Like The Age of Bronze and St. John the Baptist, Eve is one of Rodin’s grandest standing figures. Resigned, sorrowful, and tentative, Eve contains her emotion. She shares such internalization with some of Rodin’s greatest figures, The Thinker and Jean d’Aire from The Burghers of Calais among them. Eve embodies a pessimistic view of human fate, a pessimism that was to deepen with Rodin’s reading of Dante.

The first model for Eve was Adele Abruzzezzi, a young peasant woman from the mountains of central Italy. Rodin explained the lack of finish, visible in both the face and body, as a result of Adele’s leaving his studio because she had become pregnant. For the slightly later, smaller version of Eve, Rodin employed a thinner English model. This second version of the pose is more refined: the form is made more sensuous by Rodin’s softening details of the anatomy and by his reducing the accidents and animation that characterize the surface of the larger figure.