Too Real to Win: The Man with the Broken Nose

The Man with the Broken Nose was Rodin's first submission to the Salon, and alongside the bust of his father, it's considered one of his earliest major works. The model was an elderly laborer from Paris's Saint-Marcel district, known locally as "Bibi."

Rodin captured Bibi's defining features faithfully — the broken nose, the deeply etched forehead wrinkles, the distinctive style of beard. Look closely and you can see the detail of the nose itself, caved in slightly at the bridge and bent out of true. It was precisely this unflinching realism that unsettled the Salon's judges at the time, and the piece was rejected.