This Stunning Sculpture Was Sitting on a Family’s Piano. It Turned Out to Be an Original Rodin
Titled “The Despair,” the rare artwork just sold at auction for $1 million. For many years, its owners had assumed it was merely a copy
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For years, a French family kept a small marble sculpture among family photos on top of their piano. The one-foot-tall artwork depicted a seated woman holding her leg in the air, and its owners thought it was a copy of a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, the 19th-century French sculptor famous for works like The Thinker and The Kiss.
However, the sculpture wasn’t a copy. It was an original. Earlier this month, it sold for about $1 million at auction.
Titled The Despair, the sculpture is one of several versions of the same figure that Rodin sculpted for a larger work titled The Gates of Hell. The larger piece features three of these women, each with one knee bent and the other leg extended. Per the Brooklyn Museum, this figure’s “acrobatic pose reflects Rodin’s interest in dance, as well as his desire to capture expressive postures not typically seen in academic sculpture.”
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Recently, the sculpture’s owners showed it to Aymeric Rouillac of the French auction house Rouillac. “They said, ‘It’s a fake; it’s a copy,’” Rouillac tells CNN’s Jack Guy.
However, Rouillac decided to investigate further. He showed the sculpture to experts at the Comité Rodin, which is known as the authority on the artist. “I realized in a second that it was real,” Jérôme Le Blay, the committee’s co-founder, explains to CNN. “I had absolutely no doubt.”
The committee confirmed that the sculpture was an authentic Rodin that had been sold at auction in 1906. After that, it disappeared from public view, as Rouillac tells Agence France-Presse. Nearly 120 years later, “we have rediscovered it,” he adds.
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Rouillac estimated that the sculpture would fetch €500,000 to €700,000 (about $578,000 to $810,000), but it ended up selling for €860,000 (about $1 million). The buyer was a “young banker from the U.S. West Coast,” according to Artnet’s Brian Boucher.
Born in 1840, Rodin became famous for his delicate expressions of “extreme physical states,” per the Musée Rodin. “He sculpted a universe of great passion and tragedy, a world of imagination that exceeded the mundane reality of everyday existence.” The bottom of The Despair is marked by his small signature, A. Rodin.
“The back, the muscles, they are perfect,” Rouillac says to CNN. “You can feel every vertebra in the spinal column.”
Rodin modeled The Despair in 1890 and finished sculpting it from marble in 1893. The figure is one of nearly 200 figures and groups Rodin created for The Gates of Hell, which “occupied a unique place in Rodin’s oeuvre,” according to the Musée Rodin.
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The sculptor worked on The Gates of Hell on and off for years. Finally, in 1917, the first curator of the Musée Rodin received permission from the artist to reconstruct the masterwork and cast it in bronze. Rodin died that year, before seeing The Gates of Hell in its final form.
Many bronze sculptures made after Rodin’s death based on his models have been sold in recent years. But the majority of marble Rodin pieces are permanent fixtures of prestigious museums.
“Marbles in private collections are rare,” Le Blay says to CNN. As such, the newly discovered piece has a “kind of magic.”
Editors’ note, June 16, 2025: This story has been updated to correct Rodin’s birth year, which is 1840.
