One of a number of hymns to love that Rodin created when he emerged from the labours of The Gates of Hell, Eternal Spring is often associated with Rodin’s decade-long relationship with the sculptor Camille Claudel. If The Kiss may be viewed as a self-contained, classicizing composition, Eternal Spring is exuberantly baroque.

Celebrating physical love in conventional terms, the work pays homage to Rodin’s years in the atelier of Albert Carrier-Belleuse and the Sèvres porcelain factory. Even in its title, Eternal Spring echoes the neo-rococo revival prevalent in Salon painting of the 1880s and evident in the work of artists as dissimilar as Jules Dalou and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Executed in 1884-85, Eternal Spring is an example of the combination of two existing sculptures, a practice that came to dominate Rodin’s later years. The male figure is a modification of Meditation (1883), for which Claudel was the model, while the female form varies the Torso of Adele (1882). The idealization of the forms and the drama of a pose that would have been impossible for models to hold confirm that Rodin did not have access to models while working on Eternal Spring.* Through the combination of already achieved forms Rodin realized an emotion, a dream in solid form.

* Studio practice, even Rodin’s studio practice, forbade men and women posing together. According to testimony from professional models of the period, men and women were usually called to pose on different days. See Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven and London, 1993), p. 552 n. 12.