Musée Rodin
The Varenne métro stop gives you a preview: Rodin bronzes line the platform, so by the time you surface onto Rue de Varenne you're already in the work. The museum occupies the Hôtel Biron, a rococo mansion built between 1727 and 1732, and its 3-hectare garden — where The Thinker sits outdoors, unhurried, in open air.
Inside, eighteen rooms trace Rodin's evolution through clay sketches, plaster casts, bronzes and marble, alongside paintings by Van Gogh, Monet and Renoir that Rodin collected himself. A dedicated room holds sculptures by Camille Claudel, including one of only two castings of The Mature Age.
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Regulars often skip the mansion entirely on warm days and buy the garden-only ticket — cheaper, and The Gates of Hell reads differently at different hours as the light shifts across the bronze. The café L'Augustine, tucked behind the building near the small lake, is worth the stop between the garden and the galleries.
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Book directly at the providerHow Musée Rodin came to be
The Hôtel Biron had a long life before Rodin arrived. Designed by Jean Aubert and completed in 1732, it passed through aristocratic hands — the garden was later enlarged by Louis-Antoine de Gontaut-Biron, who added a fountain and an English-style landscape section. By the early twentieth century the building had become a kind of informal artists' colony; Henri Matisse was among those who worked there before Rodin rented four ground-floor rooms in 1908 as studios.
By 1911 Rodin occupied the whole building. In 1916, a year before his death, he struck a deal with the French state: he would bequeath his entire collection — ultimately 6,600 sculptures, 8,000 drawings and much more — if the state would purchase the Hôtel Biron and turn it into a museum dedicated to his work. The museum opened on 4 August 1919, and after a €16 million renovation, reopened in its current form in 2015.
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