The Gates of Hell (1880-about 1900) was Rodin's most ambitious commission. Originally conceived to be the entrance portal for a never-realized museum of decorative arts in Paris, The Gates of Hell features hundreds of figures modeled in high relief and in-the-round. The imagery in The Gates of Hell was inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and by Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal.  (Divine Comedy was written about 1307 and is the tale of a journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Les Fleurs du Mal, written in 1857, is a book of poetry that examines complex and often morbid emotional states.) The visual model for Rodin's Gates of Hell was the long-standing tradition of compartmentalized scenes on church portals, specifically the doors to the Baptistery in Florence (1425-52) designed by the Italian Renaissance artist Lorenzo Ghiberti.  Rodin, however, abandoned the formal structure of these traditional doors, creating instead an environment of tormented souls in which figures float in a surging sea of fire, representing the suffering of mankind.

After The Gates of Hell was almost completed, the French Government canceled the commission, having decided it needed a new train station instead of a museum on the site. Accordingly, the Gare d’Orsay was built and Rodin was left with a massive nearly-completed art work, with no one to pay for its casting and no place to put it. (It is ironic that today one of the original plasters for The Gates is in the Musee d’Orsay.)

Thus, beginning in the 1880s, the sculptor removed many of the nearly three-dimensional figures from The Gates of Hell and made them available as independent, freestanding sculptures. Among the most well known are The Thinker and The Three Shades.  The complete Gates of Hell was never cast during Rodin’s lifetime.

The Foundation’s traveling exhibition featured maquettes as well as scores of independent sculptures derived from The Gates of Hell.  Visiting eleven venues, this show was viewed by more than 85,000 people, making it one of the Foundation’s most popular.

"Please let me congratulate you on your endeavor to publicize and preserve the life and work of Rodin. I was fortunate enough recently to have seen an exhibit of your collection.... It was my first museum experience and I cannot imagine a better artist to begin with."