From 1898 to 1906 Rodin made significant modifications to a number of his important sculptures. These changes were concurrent with the translation into marble of his work, occasioned by the massive retrospective Rodin planned to install in his own pavilion for the Universal Exposition of 1900. Such modifications included the enlargement of The Thinker, reductions and casting of The Age of Bronze, and restructuring of St. John the Baptist.

The result of the transformation of St. John the Baptist was The Walking Man, a figure, or partial figure, executed in a variety of sizes. Rodin had kept studies related to St. John the Baptist, made in 1877-78, as parts rather than as a complete figure. He reassembled the torso and legs in 1898 but purposefully did not include the arms or head. This elimination of detail and finish emphasized his primary inspiration for the figure, a man who walks. In one version Rodin enlarged The Walking Man to approximately twice its original height; in another he reduced the figure to approximately half its original height.*

When cast in bronze or plaster, The Walking Man retained all accidents, blemishes, and unfinished areas of the clay. Rodin emphasized that The Walking Man was a record of making-and unmaking-sculpture, not merely a technical realization of an idea worked out in sculpted human forms. At its largest scale, The Walking Man is the grandest statement of the aesthetic of the fragment that Rodin brought into the twentieth century. Torso (Study for "The Walking Man") is equally dramatic and carries the artist’s ideas of the process of making and subtracting from a figure to their ultimate conclusion.

* The impetus to rework St. John the Baptist may originate in Rodin’s casting of a fragmentary torso from the late 1870s, which has been inappropriately titled Torso.