Rodin created Walking Man – “in my opinion,” he later declared, “one of my best things” –around 1899 by combining a torso and a pair of legs that he had modeled two decades earlier in connection with his statue of Saint John the Baptist.
Rodin had re-discovered the clay torso, by then cracked and fissured like an ancient statue, in his studio in 1887 and had cast it in bronze as an autonomous sculpture, powerfully expressive in its fragmentary form.
Now, he mounted the torso atop the forked legs, the juncture of the two pieces representing the very fulcrum of the body in motion. Stripping away all anecdote and rhetoric, Rodin achieved an expression of pure movement–the powerful forward stride of a seeker, a striver, a prophet, a visionary.