Auguste Rodin

What failed

He applied to the École des Beaux-Arts three times between 1857 and 1859 and was refused every time. He had trained at the Petite École, the government school for craft and design, and after leaving it in 1857 he earned his living as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, working in the workshops of other artists by day and on his own sculpture at night. In 1871 he went to Belgium with Carrier-Belleuse to work on the ornamentation of the Bourse Palace in Brussels, and spent the next six years outside France. The Salon rejected the first sculpture he offered for exhibition, the Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, twice, in 1864 and 1865. When he finally showed a life-size figure, The Age of Bronze, in Paris in 1877, he was accused of having moulded it from a living body and had to prove he had not. The Monument to Balzac, commissioned in 1891 and delivered in 1898 — the Musée Rodin's own two pages on the work put the labour at eight years and at six — was refused by the Société des Gens de Lettres that had commissioned it, and the commission was cancelled.

What happened next

The Salon accepted a marble version of the Man with the Broken Nose in 1875, eleven years after refusing the plaster; the marble was carved by one of his assistants. The lifecasting accusation did not stick: the French state bought The Age of Bronze in 1880 and commissioned The Gates of Hell for a planned museum of decorative arts that, by the end of the decade, was clearly never going to be built. In 1900 he organised his own retrospective alongside the Paris Universal Exposition rather than showing inside it, in a pavilion of his own that held 168 bronzes, marbles and plasters. In 1906 The Thinker, paid for by public subscription, was placed in front of the Panthéon. In 1916 he bequeathed everything he owned to the French state, which bought the Hôtel Biron and agreed to make it the Musée Rodin. He died on 17 November 1917, with the Balzac still in plaster. A bronze was finally erected in public and inaugurated on the central reservation of the boulevard Raspail on 1 July 1939, forty-one years after the Société refused the plaster; he never saw it in bronze.

The point

The refusals did not stop him working. They decided what work he could get, which was ornament on other men's buildings, unsigned, for most of two decades. His own description of those years is the useful part: he said he did not know he had any talent, that he knew he had skill but never thought he was anything more than a workman, that he did not sign his work and was not known. The motivational reading — that the examiners were blind to genius — does not survive contact with the sources: Wikipedia notes that entrance requirements at the Grande École were not particularly high, and the usual explanation of the rejections is that the judges' neoclassical taste did not match the eighteenth-century sculpture he had been schooled in at the Petite École. The pattern held after he was famous: the Calais monument went up in 1895 on a large pedestal he had not wanted, the Gates of Hell had no building left to hang in, and the Balzac was refused by the people who paid for it and stayed at Meudon — studio, then pavilion, then garden — for the rest of his life.