The Thinker

The Thinker is a bronze sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, originally conceived around 1880 as a smaller figure intended for the tympanum of his unfinished monumental bronze doorway The Gates of Hell, itself inspired by Dante's Inferno, before Rodin enlarged the figure and began casting it as an independent work in the early twentieth century. It depicts a powerfully muscled nude man seated in deep contemplation, chin resting on hand and body bent forward in tension, an image originally intended to represent the poet observing the suffering below him but long since read more broadly as a universal emblem of thought itself. Multiple full-size bronze casts exist in museums around the world, including the Musee Rodin in Paris, and it remains among the most widely recognized sculptures in the history of Western art.