Which Paris art school rejected Auguste Rodin’s applications three times?

The École des Beaux-Arts rejected Auguste Rodin’s applications three times. The prestigious Paris school trained many leading French artists, but Rodin was never admitted as a student there.

Rodin instead studied at the Petite École, officially the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques, where Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran encouraged close observation and memory drawing. This education helped shape Rodin’s independent approach to sculpture.

Rodin’s rejection is sometimes presented as proof that he was entirely self-taught, but that is misleading. He received formal training at the Petite École and worked in the studios of other artists, including Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. His later success came despite exclusion from the École des Beaux-Arts, not from a complete absence of artistic education.