Rodin’s notebooks, notes and drafts

This ambitious and promising research project was initiated in 2013, in partnership with the École du Louvre. It began by focusing on the corpus of Rodin’s personal notebooks, and currently aims to study and analyse all the artist’s notes.

Each year, students at the École du Louvre are faced with this unpublished corpus and familiarise themselves with the artist’s handwriting during a several-month seminar course – a useful learning experience for the new generation of researchers. Year by year, the notebooks are gradually being transcribed; in 2019, 88 had been transcribed out of a total of 163. The ultimate goal is to publish the whole corpus online, thereby providing the research community with a unique reference tool. This essential new resource will offer an insight into the artist’s thought processes and reflections on the subjects of greatest interest to him, while opening up new perspectives, essential for expanding our view of Rodin, his life and work.