Naked Came I

Naked Came I is a bestselling 1963 historical novel by David Weiss based on the life of sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Naked Came I portrays Rodin as a born artist who was driven to be an artist because his desire and temperament would allow him to be nothing else. It portrays him as friends with other contemporary Parisian artists such as Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and other artists of the Second French Empire who either exhibited or were in some way associated with the Salon des Refusés and were generally outside the Paris art establishment of the era, and who had been refused admission to the École des Beaux Arts. The title is derived, according to the frontispiece, from Cervantes' Don Quixote. (Cervantes, in turn, had taken it from the Book of Job, 1:21.)

Due to the success of Weiss' previous novels, the book was, almost simultaneously with its American publication, also published in the United Kingdom and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy.

In popular culture, Naked Came I was the title of the sensationalized memoir of Opus the Penguin in the Berke Breathed comic strip, Bloom County.