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The Rodin Museum is an art museum located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that contains one of the largest collections of sculptor Auguste Rodin's works outside Paris. Opened in 1929, the museum is administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The museum houses a collection of nearly 150 objects containing bronzes, marbles, and plasters by Rodin.
Monument to Balzac is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in memory of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. According to Rodin, the sculpture aims to portray the writer's persona rather than a physical likeness. The work was commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres and a full-size plaster model was displayed in 1898 at a Salon in Champ de Mars. After coming under criticism the model was rejected by the Société and Rodin moved it to his home in Meudon. On 2 July 1939 (22 years after the sculptor's death) the model was cast in bronze for the first time and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail.
Casts and various studies of the sculpture are today in many different collections including the Ackland Art Museum, Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum in Antwerp, The Norton Simon Museum of Art, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Musée Rodin in Meudon, the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian) in Washington D.C, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in front of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, in Caracas, Venezuela in the open spaces around the former Ateneo de Caracas, now UNEARTES and Balzac in the Robe of a Dominican Monk in Museo Soumaya in Mexico City. Today the artwork is sometimes considered the first truly modern sculpture.
The Philadelphia Art Museum (PhAM), formerly the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval. The museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin. The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts.
The Philadelphia Art Museum administers several annexes including the Rodin Museum, also located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, which is located across the street just north of the main building. The Perelman Building, which opened in 2007, houses more than 150,000 prints, drawings and photographs, 30,000 costume and textile pieces, and over 1,000 modern and contemporary design objects including furniture, ceramics, and glasswork.