From the moment the work was commissioned in 1880 until his death thirty-seven years later, The Gates of Hell dominated much of Auguste Rodin's life, thought, and labor. Inspired by Dante's Inferno and permeated by the sense of anguish expressed in the numerous writhing, nude figures, The Gates conveys Rodin's own deeply felt sense of the tragic fate of humanity. Over the years, the artist constantly reworked the doors, adding, subtracting, and altering figures and their relationships. Many of his most memorable individual sculptures, including The Thinker, began as figures for The Gates. The planned museum in Paris for which the doors had been commissioned remained unbuilt, however, and Rodin's great project existed only in plaster when he died. It was the Philadelphia theater entrepreneur Jules Mastbaum who commissioned the first two bronze casts of the doors, one for his native city and the other for the Musée Rodin in Paris. Today the Philadelphia cast still stands at the entrance to the Rodin Museum that Mastbaum gave to the City of Philadelphia. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 210.