Auguste Rodin

Rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts, Rodin worked for years as a decorator's assistant. His first important figure was so lifelike that he was accused of casting it from a living model, and he had to prove otherwise.

He gave the French state his entire collection on condition that it be kept as a museum. He and his wife Rose, who died two weeks before him after fifty-three years together, lie in the garden at Meudon beneath a cast of "The Thinker".