Exhibited at the annual Paris Salon under the title Cupid and Psyche, the sculpture now commonly known as Eternal Springtime developed out of Rodin's ambitious project for The Gates of Hell. Working with small-scale figures in plaster and driven by his immersion in the poetry of Baudelaire, Dante, and Ovid, Rodin explored universal themes such as human love in the 1880s. The fluidity of the artist's working process is especially visible in this composition, which reuses and adapts figures from another work. The female figure is based on the sensuous torso of a woman---called Torso of Adèle after the woman who modeled for it---in the upper left tympanum of The Gates. Here, she is fully formed and is joined in an erotic embrace with a male figure who has small wings on his back, like the figure of Eros or Cupid. A sentimental work, Eternal Springtime was reproduced many times in both marble and bronze. The floating, weightless limbs of the figures in the original plaster model, also at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, become heavier and more earthbound in the bronze version with the introduction of the rock on which the pair leans. Jennifer A. Thompson, from Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art (2007), p. 102.