"What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes."
Auguste Rodin

Finding myself in a big room filled with more than 50 sculptures by Auguste Rodin I felt as if he put them there temporarily if to say; “ I be right back”. It seems overwhelming and creates some sort of a “presence”. I can feel the emotions reflecting off the sculptures. The forms and lines of the sculptures playing with the light create a magical harmony in this room. Although as fascinated I am in this room, Le Penseur, or The Thinker, mesmerized me most.

Photo © Hedwig M. Heerschop 2009
The immense figure sitting in the middle of the room created quite a focal point. I could sit here for hours and see myself in the same position in unguarded moments when I am drifting away in my own thoughts. I drift back for a moment to my home country where seven bronze sculptures were stolen last year January from a Dutch Museum near my hometown in the Netherlands. One of the bronze works was The Thinker. It was found but was badly damaged by the thieves who were probably after the bronze for money. They had already taken off one leg and made a start on the head.
Photo ANP
The museum decided to exhibit The Thinker in damaged state to show the public how these thugs managed to ruin something so irreplaceable. But is it irreplaceable? What is not replaceable is it’s unique place in the line of reproduction. The image could be replaced the provenance can not. After Rodin’s death in 1917 the state of France inherited all his works and molds with no restrictions on quantity. Rodin made all his sculptures out of clay and then made plaster molds. Rodin poured the first sculpture of The Thinker in 1902 and after that there were twenty more replica’s made. The one in the Dutch museum was one of the earlier ones. So is this one than considered an original, or the one here in Stanford’s Cantor Museum, or all the other ones spread around the world? Each one is unique as unique as our individual responses to it.
Rodin created The Thinker originally for his monumental Gates of Hell also to be seen at Stanford University. They are a pair of bronze doors intended for a museum of decorative arts in Paris. He didn’t cast The Gates of Hell during his lifetime, but it gave Rodin a rich source of ideas for individual figures and groups that he worked and reworked for the rest of his career.
The theme for Gates of Hell was taken from Dante's Inferno, and The Thinker was Dante himself. The initial plan was to put the figure on top of The Gates of Hell. It was not until 1880 that Rodin started to exhibit The Poet/Thinker. Many more were cast in a smaller size made from the original hand-made clay model.
Here I sit overwhelmed by the powerful emotions created by being surrounded by such incredible work. It makes one think.

Photo © Hedwig M. Heerschop 2009