Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

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Auguste Rodin designed The Gates of Hell (1880–about 1900), the first major commission received by the artist, for the entrance to a museum of decorative arts. Even though it was never completed, the project served as a supreme demonstration of Rodin’s expressive interpretation of the human body. He modeled hundreds of figures for the commission, and already by the late 1880s some of them had become independent works. The Creator was one of two lower moldings in extremely low relief added to the door panels after 1898. It depicted a self-portrait of the artist, the only known work of this kind, with a nude female muse over his shoulder.

The small-scale female form perched behind the crouching man appears to have been produced by his thought process. Like the mythological story of athena, who sprang fully grown from the head of her father, Zeus, she seems like a manifestation of the artist’s creative imagination.

As Rodin’s overall project evolved, he modified countless details. The alterations underscored the artist’s inductive approach to his work, demonstrating that the final design could not have been envisioned at the outset. By deciding against a continuous narrative and developing independent compartments unrelated to specific textual sources, Rodin was free to introduce individual or paired figures and groups according to his own compositional or structural needs. as Alhadeff suggested, the relief located on the inside left reveal served as a form of signature, using the artist’s own physiognomy to mark his creation.

T. Barton Thurber