Auguste Rodin moved into Paris’s Hôtel Biron in 1908, several years before the building became the Musée Rodin.
The Hôtel Biron was an eighteenth-century mansion in the Invalides district. Rodin began using rooms there as a studio and residence while the building’s future was uncertain. Its spacious rooms and garden suited his large collection of sculptures, plaster models, and antiques.
Rodin later agreed to donate his works, drawings, and collections to the French state in exchange for continued use of the Hôtel Biron. After his death, the building was converted into the Musée Rodin, which opened to the public in 1919.
A common mix-up is to identify the Hôtel Biron simply as Rodin’s Paris museum from the beginning. Rodin occupied it first; the museum came later through his bequest and the state’s subsequent arrangements.