Auguste Rodin follows last year's Adam with…

Auguste Rodin follows last year's Adam with a sculpture of Eve.

In these works and others related to the great door commission, he often works with mere fragments such as broken torsos, thus enormously enlarging the range of figure composition.

The mass, until then the principal vehicle of sculptural composition, is explosively opened by these methods; in contrast to earlier sculpture, which depended on the interplay of solid and void, Rodin's works are fused with the surrounding space.

He visits London in 1881 at the invitation of the painter Alphonse Legros, Slade professor of Fine Art at University College since 1876.

There, Rodin sees the many Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings inspired by Dante, above all the hallucinatory works of William Blake.

Profoundly altered by this experience, he transforms his plans for the great bronze door, which is commissioned for delivery in 1884, to ones that will reveal a universe of convulsed forms tormented by love, pain, and death.