Rodin's celebrated sculpture, "The Thinker," has been shipped from San Francisco to sunny Santa Barbara for an extended vacation.
The 19th-century bronze has been uprooted from its marble pedestal in the garden court of the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor, while the museum undergoes seismic repairs.The sculpture represents "a universal theme of creativity," said Steven A. Nash, the museum's chief curator and associate director.
"It's a self-portrait of Rodin the artist, in a pose of deep thought," he said. The museum's cast of the "The Thinker" is one of perhaps 12 to 19 of its size produced from 19th-century molds.
The 61/2-foot-tall, 2,750-pound sculpture has greeted visitors since the museum opened in 1924. It will be on loan to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for the estimated 21/2 years it will take the Legion of Honor to rework its foundations.
The statue arrived in San Francisco in 1915 with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, founder of the Legion of Honor, purchased it from the artist.