Musée Rodin

Auguste Rodin moved into the Hôtel Biron, an elegant 18th-century mansion, in 1908 when it was a run-down building rented out as artists' studios. Matisse, Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan were among his neighbors. When the French state bought the building, Rodin offered to donate his entire collection — sculptures, drawings, and his personal art collection — on the condition that they turn it into a museum. The deal was struck in 1916, a year before he died.

The garden is the real treasure. The Thinker sits brooding on his plinth near the entrance, The Gates of Hell rise at the back, and The Burghers of Calais stand in a group near the side. Seeing these sculptures outdoors, surrounded by rose bushes and perfectly trimmed hedges with the Invalides dome rising behind them, is incomparably better than seeing them in a sterile gallery. Rodin himself insisted his work belonged outside.

The Thinker was originally meant to represent Dante contemplating the circles of Hell — it sat at the top of The Gates of Hell before Rodin enlarged it into a standalone piece. It's become the universal symbol of intellectual thought, reproduced so often it's easy to forget how radical it was: a nude male figure with the muscular tension of a laborer, not a Greek god, shown in the act of thinking.

Inside the mansion, the rooms are filled with Rodin's plaster studies, marble works, and bronze casts, alongside paintings from his personal collection by Van Gogh, Monet, and Renoir. There's also a room dedicated to Camille Claudel, Rodin's student, lover, and a brilliant sculptor in her own right, whose work was overshadowed by his fame and whose story is one of the great tragedies of art history.