This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Auguste Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 1998-756B.

L'Eternel printemps, one of Rodin's most popular compositions, depicts two young lovers swept up in the ecstasy of a kiss. The figures are arranged in a dynamic, sinuous embrace, epitomizing Rodin’s innovative approach towards representing the body during this period. The female figure’s gracefully arched back is counterbalanced by the male figure’s balletic gesture. It is unsurprising that collectors have always been attracted to the work’s sensual lyricism.

As with many of his great sculptures, Rodin derived the figurative elements of L’Eternel printemps from earlier works. The female figure, for example, is based on Torse d'Adèle, which appears on the top left corner of the tympanum of La porte de l'enfer. Rodin first named the sculpture Zéphyr et la terre, and subsequently submitted the composition to the Paris Salon of 1897 as Cupidon et Psyché. By 1900, however, Rodin eliminated any reference to mythology and exhibited the composition under the more secular title, L'Eternel printemps.

The present subject may have been informed by the artist’s personal life. Rodin sculpted the amorous couple while engaged in an affair with the sculptor Camille Claudel, who had entered his studio as a student the previous year. This new romance may have inspired Rodin to abandon convention and depict love in deeply passionate and intimate terms. Rodin later claimed, however, that the idea for the present bronze came to him while listening to Beethoven's sublime Second Symphony; he wrote to Jeanne Russell, the daughter of the Australian painter John Russell: "God, how [Beethoven] must have suffered to write that! And yet, it was while listening to it for the first time that I pictured Eternal Springtime, just as I have modeled it since" (quoted in The Bronzes of Rodin, exh. cat., Musée Rodin, Paris, 2007, p. 336).