Monument to Victor Hugo

When the major French literary master Victor Hugo passed away, the government drew up a plan to establish a statue to commemorate him in the Panthéon (a mausoleum for great people), and they commissioned Rodin to produce this work (ultimately it would be established on Avenue Victor-Hugo in the 16th arrondissement of Paris). Rodin looked back over Hugo's life and expressed it as a deified statue in which Hugo is sitting atop a rock wall in Guernsey, the location in which he took exile, and two spirits are blowing inspiration upon him from behind.