One of the most innovative and influential sculptors of the 19th and 20th centuries, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) is widely regarded as the founder of modern sculpture. The French artist was an ardent observer of the human body and his interest in partial figures, fragmentation and formal relationships rather than narrative structure laid the foundation for abstraction in 20th-century sculpture. In the 1880s and 1890s, he produced several studies of hands whilst working on The Burghers of Calais (1884–95), a public monument commemorating the heroism of the French town’s leading men, who offered their lives to England’s King Edward III in exchange for sparing their fellow citizens. This large-scale hand, with its impassioned, clawing fingers, conveys an anguished, emotional intensity. Rodin considered it an independent work and, like many of his sculptures, moulding marks and other signs of the sculptural process are left visible as a radical rejection of naturalism.