68: The Rodin Room

Eternal Spring

Early 1900s

Rodin, Auguste

In 1880 Rodin was commissioned by the French government to produce bronze doors for a proposed Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. He took as his basis the famous Gates of Paradise produced in the 15th century by Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti for the doors of the Florence Baptistery. The Gates of Hell was a work full of emotion, passion and tragedy, for which the original idea came from Dante's Divine Comedy. In the process of work, however, which continued until the master's death, Rodin continually changed and expanded his range of themes and images. In the bas-reliefs of The Gates of Hell Rodin embodied both love and sorrow, despair and recollections of the Day of Judgment.

This image of lovers embodies the poetry of youthful sensuality. Rodin employed a special method of working the stone, generalising form, not finishing the marble in the hollows. The outline seems to dance and the white marble to let light into its surface, creating an impression of purity and chastity in a scene of love.

The only existing complete casts of the full Gates of Hell were made after the sculptor's death in 1917 and, like many others of the 186 sculptures which went into Rodin's magnificent unfinished Gates of Hell, Eternal Spring gained fame as an independent work. Amongst Rodin's most famous sculptures are a number of pieces originally intended as part of the Gates of Hell, the most renowned being The Thinker.