Rodin's Death

Paris has been deeply shocked by a report of the circumstances of the death of the great Impressionist sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

A book by Mile. Tirel, Rodin's secretary, states definitely that Rodin died of cold, neglected by friends and officials of the state, while his sculptures, which he had given to the nation, were kept warmly housed in a centrally heated museum at public expense. His case was so desperate that he asked to be permitted to have a room in the museum--the Hotel Biron, formerly his own studio. The official in charge of the museum refused. Other officials and friends promised coal but never sent it, though his situation at Meudon, ill, and freezing to death, was apparently well known to all of them.

No one in a position to know the facts has denied Mile. Tirel's charges. The book has the sanction of Rodin's son.

Auguste Rodin, the greatest sculptor of his time, sought the same thing in stone which Monet sought in paint--movement and the effect of luminosity. He was a self-made man in more than one sense, since, working up from poverty, carving statues for 60 years, he resembled in his last years one of his own works in stone.

His greatest works include, among literally scores of others, a Kiss, which made him famous, a bathrobe which made him notorious, and a meditative caveman who made him immortal. The bathrobe was carved upon the statue of Balzac, hiding the pudgy limbs, revealing the noble head. It caused a furious outcry and was, naturally, rejected. But the conception was quite logical, for Balzac's head was the only distinguished feature of his personal appearance. Therefore, in the statue, the head is the only thing the observer sees. The rest is bathrobe.

One copy of the magnificent caveman, The Thinker, of which Rodin cast several examples in bronze, is seated now in front of the Detroit Museum of Art, where it was placed last autumn.