The teenaged Rodin applied for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. But:
“Rodin, who competed for the first time at seventeen, failed to gain admission — not once but three times within eighteen months. The humiliation of these rebuffs was scarcely lessened by the fact that the examiners acknowledged his gift for drawing but rejected his sculptures.”
Some people give up. Yet:
“Eventually he was to see this rejection as a blessing in disguise. ‘I was refused by the École des Beaux-Arts,’ he writes in one of his self-sketches. ‘Great good luck.’ The sculptor Jules Dalou, who had succeeded in gaining admission but dropped out after repeatedly failing to win the Prix de Rome, told him that he was fortunate to have escaped indoctrination — ‘It would have killed you.’”
Sources: Grunfeld, Frederic V. Rodin: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), p. 31. The image is Charles Aubrey’s daguerreotype of Rodin at age 22.
[I’m reminded of another famous art-school reject who, according to shallow interpretations, became who he was because of that rejection.]
Related: Key Works of Art in History, Newberry series.