Almost a century ago, one of the world’s most famous sculptures was on display in the east Sussex county town of Lewes.

The Kiss by Rodin was offered to the town by wealthy American art collector Edward Perry Warren who lived at Lewes House.

Warren and his friend John Marshall had established what they called a clearing house for ancient works of art at Lewes House, which he bought in 1890.

They supplied many major antiquities to the Boston Fine Arts Museum, and also important works in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Ashmolean in Oxford, and the Leipzig Museum.

The classical pieces which passed through Lewes House included the Chaos head, considered to be one of the finest Greek sculptures in existence, a head of Aphrodite, a bronze head of the Roman Empress Livid, and a torso of Hermes.

Warren enjoyed Lewes House, which had much more land then than it has now, and found its secluded but central position ideal for his needs.

He furnished it lavishly, also keeping Arab horses and St Bernard dogs there.

Warren and Marshall were friendly with many artists including painters William Rothenstein, John Fothergill and Roger Fry. There were suspicions, largely correct, in the prudish town that many in the group were gay.

Fothergill and Rothenstein persuaded Warren to finance the new Carfax Gallery in London with work by contemporary artists including Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Max Beerbohm and Auguste Rodin.

Rothenstein saw the first version of The Kiss at the 1898 Salon in Paris. He thought Warren would like its pagan sexuality and that Rodin could do with the money.

He arranged a deal for Warren to buy a larger version of The Kiss for £1,000. Rodin, at the peak of his fame, visited Lewes House in 1903, and a year later the great work arrived.

Warren was immensely rich, having inherited his father’s paper mill in Maine. He had no interest in the business and fell in love with England after arriving at Oxford University.

There is a suspicion that Warren didn’t like the statue as much as Rothenstein had hoped but this has never been proved.

In 1914 Warren offered to lend The Kiss to Lewes for public display but local puritans launched a campaign to have the statue in the Town Hall screened from public view.

The campaign leader was a spinster headmistress called Kate Fowler-Tutt. She contended it was wrong to have such an erotic statue in full view in a room where young soldiers were billeted during the First World War.

In 1917 the statue was returned to Lewes House, where it was kept in the stable block because of its size. Rodin died that same year.

After Warren died in 1929, The Kiss was auctioned by the Lewes firm of Gorringes but failed to reach its reserve price. Instead it went on display at Cheltenham before being loaned to the Tate Gallery in London.

In 1952 Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate and son of William, who had made the original deal for The Kiss, staged a successful public appeal to buy it for the nation.

Lewes House eventually became the headquarters of the district council and is now a listed building.

The Kiss returned to Lewes in 1999 for an exhibition which proved extremely popular, and many people then regretted the decision of their ancestors to shun Rodin’s great work.