[1] This sculpture was a particular challenge to the artist due to his preference to portray his subjects in great detail, and the fact that Balzac was already dead.

Rodin then started to research about the life and times of his subject, only to find, according to Kenneth Clark, that he had been a short, fat and unremarkable-looking man.

[3] Instead of the agreed-upon eighteen months, Rodin spent seven years making different studies, both nude and non-nude, only to present his final plaster in 1898 at a Salon in Champ de Mars with great disapproval by the Societè.

Unlike other studies and the final version of the monument, Balzac in the Robe of a Dominican Monk shows the author fully clothed with the traditional habit of the Dominican order—a simple cloak with a belt— standing in a rock-like structure and with both hands explicitly shown.

Rodin himself has been quoted about this piece, considering that "the fruit and summing-up of my entire life and the pivot of my personal aesthetic".