Auguste Rodin: The Thinker Mini Sculpture*The Met Store Hot

An artful sculpture gift inspired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This iconic figure is a miniature reproduction of Auguste Rodin’s (French, 1840–1917) The Thinker (modeled ca. 1880, cast ca. 1910), who was intended to sit over the lintel of the artist’s The Gates of Hell, contemplating the fate of the damned. Independent bronzes of The Thinker became especially popular among American patrons, and this cast in the Museum’s European Sculpture and Decorative Arts holdings was commissioned from the sculptor’s studio by Thomas Fortune Ryan, the principal founder of The Met’s Rodin collection. As one critic described it, The Thinker—simultaneously cerebral and muscular—embodies both “dream and action.”