The Kiss

The marble is over life size and cut with extraordinary contrast between the polished bodies and the raw rock they sit on. Look at the man's back, where the muscles are tense with restraint, and at the woman's foot hooked over his leg. Rodin's assistants carved the marble from his plaster model, and he finished the surfaces himself. Notice that the lips do not quite touch: the sculpture is the instant before the kiss, and the book that Paolo has dropped, the story of Lancelot that they were reading together, lies in his hand.

This version was commissioned in nineteen hundred by Edward Perry Warren, an American collector living in Lewes in Sussex, who asked for the man's genitals to be fully shown. It was delivered in nineteen hundred and four and proved too large for his house, so it sat in the stables for years. Lent to Lewes town hall in nineteen fourteen, it was covered with a sheet after complaints, and finally bought for the nation in nineteen fifty five. It has moved between Tate Britain and Tate Modern over the years and is most often shown in the ground floor spaces at Bankside.

Did You Know? The marble was once draped in a sheet in Lewes town hall after local residents objected to it during the First World War.