Auguste Rodin

A study head, apparently — one of a pile made while wrestling with a monument to a writer who'd been dead about forty years. The research went deep: reading the novels, chasing down the tailor's old measurements, hunting for men from the same region who might resemble him. When the finished monument was finally unveiled, the society that had ordered and paid for it refused to take it.

It came out of a huge doorway commission — bronze doors for a museum that was never actually built, so they never got hung anywhere. He kept picking at that project for decades and casting single figures out of it along the way, and this is one of those. The debt to Michelangelo is one he apparently never bothered to hide.