The Thinker (French: Le Penseur) is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, held in the Musée Rodin, in Paris. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle. It is sometimes used to represent philosophy.
Originally named The Poet, the piece was part of a commission by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, to create a monumental portal -- the Gates of Hell -- to act as the door of the museum. Rodin based his theme on The Divine Comedy of Dante. Each of the statues in the piece represented one of the main characters in the epic poem. The Thinker was originally meant to depict Dante in front of the gates of Hell, pondering his great poem. (In the final sculpture, a miniature of the statue sits atop the gates, pondering the hellish fate of those beneath him.) The sculpture is nude, as Rodin wanted a heroic figure in the tradition of Michelangelo, to represent intellect as well as poetry.
Rodin made a first small plaster version around 1880. The first large-scale bronze cast was finished in 1902, but was not presented to the public until 1904. It became the property of the city of Paris, thanks to a subscription organized by Rodin admirers, and was put in front of the Panthéon in 1906. In 1922, however, it was moved to the Hôtel Biron, transformed into a Rodin Museum.
More than any other Rodin sculpture, The Thinker moved into the popular imagination, as an immediately recognizable icon of intellectual activity; consequently it has been subject to endless satirical use. This began already in Rodin's lifetime. Armand Hammer records that, on meeting Lenin face to face in 1912, he gave the Bolshevik leader a small sculpture of a chimpanzee in Thinker pose, meditating on a human skull, in recognition of the Darwinist slant of Lenin's thinking.
Until September 2006, the original cast was on display at Sakip Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Prior to that, the original cast was displayed in Hartford, Connecticut, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, in March and April 2006. Since the beginning of 2007, it is back in Paris.