Moments from Musee Rodin

The Hotel Biron, an elegant eighteenth-century mansion in central Paris, became Auguste Rodin's home and studio in his final years, and after his death in 1917 it opened as a museum dedicated entirely to his work, exactly as he'd negotiated with the French state in exchange for donating his sculptures, drawings, and personal collection. The building and its considerable garden, roughly three hectares, let major works like The Thinker and The Gates of Hell be seen both indoors in intimate, domestically scaled rooms and outdoors against greenery and open sky, a range most single-building museums can't offer.

Don't skip the garden for the indoor galleries alone, it's arguably the better half of the visit: several of Rodin's largest and most famous bronzes are installed outdoors, and seeing The Thinker or The Burghers of Calais in natural light, with room to walk entirely around them, changes how the sculptures read compared to a fixed gallery spotlight. Camille Claudel, Rodin's student, collaborator, and lover, whose own sculptural talent he both encouraged and, by most accounts, overshadowed, has a dedicated room here too, worth seeking out specifically rather than assuming this is a museum only about Rodin himself.