Auguste Rodin’s Burghers of Calais depicts six figures.
The sculpture commemorates six prominent citizens of Calais who, according to a medieval account, volunteered to surrender themselves to King Edward III of England during the siege of 1346. They hoped their sacrifice would spare the besieged town. Rodin represented the men as individuals rather than as a single heroic mass.
The six figures are Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d’Aire, Jacques de Wissant, Pierre de Wissant, Jean de Fiennes, and Andrieu d’Andres. Their varied gestures, expressions, and poses emphasize fear, courage, exhaustion, and uncertainty. This psychological individuality was unusual for a public monument of its period.
The work was unveiled in Calais in 1895. Some later historical scholarship questions details of the traditional medieval story, but the six-person composition is a fixed and defining feature of Rodin’s monument.