The Rodin Museum

Located on the north side of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 22nd Street, the Rodin Museum houses the largest public collection of works, outside of Paris, by the celebrated late nineteenth-century French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The collection was given to the city by Philadelphia movie theater magnate and philanthropist Jules E. Mastbaum, whose consuming enthusiasm for Rodin led him to acquire an astonishing array of bronze casts and plaster studies within a remarkably short period of time.

In 1926, Mastbaum commissioned architects Paul Cret and Jacques Gréber to design a Neoclassical building and garden on the new Parkway to house his collection. Despite his sudden death later that year, construction proceeded and the Museum was opened in 1929. In 1939, the Fairmount Park Commission appointed the Philadelphia Museum of Art to administer the Rodin Museum and to care for the works of art placed there. A major renovation and reinstallation of the Rodin Museum was completed in 1989, providing an entrance for disabled visitors, new exhibition furniture in bronze and wood, and a regrouping of the works of art to better articulate Rodin's major themes and subjects.

The collection includes casts of many of Rodin's best-known sculptures, as well as maquettes, drawings, prints, letters, books, and a variety of documentary material. The artist's imposing The Gates of Hell stands at the entrance to the Museum and one of his most famous works, The Thinker, greets visitors at the gate along the Parkway.