Art by Auguste Rodin

Rodin spent nearly four decades working, on and off, on The Gates of Hell, a monumental bronze doorway commissioned for a Paris museum that was never actually built, and it's from this unfinished project that two of his most famous single figures, The Thinker and The Kiss, were pulled out and enlarged as standalone works. He had a long, difficult relationship with fellow sculptor Camille Claudel, his student and collaborator for years, whose own career was overshadowed by his fame and who later spent the last three decades of her life confined to a psychiatric institution. His 1898 monument to novelist Honoré de Balzac, a rough, almost featureless robed figure, was rejected by the commissioning society for being too radical and wasn't cast in bronze until after his death.