A Rare Rodin Sculpture, Lost for Over a Century, Fetches $1.2 Million at Auction

artnet.com, Brian Boucher

The piece long sat atop the owner’s piano in their home, its value unknown.

French auction house owner Aymeric Rouillac had no idea what lay in store for him when a collector from Berry contacted him about an item for possible sale. While visiting, he came upon something else of interest: a rare small sculpture by the French Modernist giant Auguste Rodin. The piece, measuring just under a foot high, hid in plain sight atop the owner’s piano at their home; the family was unaware of its value before the auctioneer came across it in late 2024. “So we rediscovered it,” Rouillac told France 24.

Founded in 1983 and operating salesrooms in Paris, Vendôme, and Tours, Rouillac sold the work on Sunday in its “Garden Party” sale, held at the Château de Villandry, a castle in western France. Bidding stretched over 20 minutes, with collectors from China, Switzerland and the United States vying for the prize. A young banker from the U.S. West Coast took it home for €1.1 million ($1.2 million).

The piece had last come to auction in Paris in 1906 and bore a high estimate of €700,000 ($800,000). This is the house’s 16th million-dollar sale, and it set a record for a rendition of this subject by Rodin.

Le Désespoir (ca. 1892–93) is an allegory of despair; the white marble sculpture shows a seated nude woman, her right leg drawn up close to her body, her left leg extended, with her hands holding her left foot.

The piece is believed to have sold first to the financier Alexandre Blanc, then to have gone to auction in 1906, when it sold for 4,100 francs, then to Paris dealer Eugène Finschhof and Paris collector Paul Chevallier, before going to the seller.

A marble sculpture bearing the same title and of about the same size sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1990 for $797,500 against a $220,000 high estimate; that record was broken on Sunday. Other comparable examples, the house pointed out, reside at the Kunsthaus Zurich, from the collection of Emil Bührle, and in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A larger example in limestone resides with the Cantor Art Collection at Stanford University in California.

Its having sold to a financier in 1906 and a banker in 2025 inspired the auctioneer to dryly observe in press materials, “Despair inspires bankers.”

Rodin is perhaps best known for another allegorical figure, The Thinker, first commissioned in 1880 and planned to sit atop a sculptural doorway for a future decorative arts museum but later reimagined as a freestanding work.

Rodin’s auction record stands at $20.4 million, set by the two-foot-high marble sculpture L’éternel printemps (1884) at Sotheby’s New York in 2016. Seven of his works have sold for more than $10 million, entering “trophy” territory; three of those are bronze casts of the Thinker, according to the Artnet Price Database.

The Paris-based Musée Rodin will open its first international branch in Shanghai this September, a move coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the diplomatic ties between France and China. Originally planned for Shenzhen, it was later relocated to Shanghai because of its vibrant art scene, economic growth, and promising future.