Like the immortal ‘Kiss’, the exquisite marble sculpture of two naked lovers fused with passion and the great ‘Thinker’, originally known as the ‘Poet’, as it was supposed to represent the poet Dante, the ‘Three Shades’ is also a single part of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s huge compositional piece, known as the ‘Gates of Hell’. The magnificent composition was based on the 16th century long, narrative and epic poem, the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighier and was created as an entranceway for the proposed Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Dante in his ‘Divine Comedy’ described the shades, the souls of the damned, stand at the entrance to Hell, pointing to an indisputable and unambiguous inscription, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ Initially, Rodin had the intention to have a life size Adam and Eve flanking the Gates. However, as the French government did not want the Adam or the Eve in the composition, the master artist discarded the idea and after making several studies, finally decided to assemble three identical figures that seem to be turning around the same point with their heads hang lower than it would be possible for them to do in reality.

The angle at which the heads fall downward is so much exaggerated that the necks and shoulders form an almost horizontal line and through this anatomical distortion, Rodin achieved an expressive force quite unparalleled in his time.

In fact, the Three Shades are three separate casts of the same figure that has been rotated into different positions and each is a small version of the monumental bronze Adam, created by Rodin. Like the twisting and tormented pose of his 1880-1881 statue ‘Adam’, the influence of Michelangelo is obvious on Rodin in the ‘Three Shades’, which the artist planned to place on the top of the gates from where they could gaze down at the spectators.

The Decorative Arts Museum, for which the composition of the Gates of Hell was commissioned, was never built. Rodin worked for many years in his life on this project on the ground floor of the Hôtel Biron. In 1919, two years after his death, it became the Musée Rodin housing a cast of The Gates of Hell and related works.

Later, the Three Shades was cast in bronze in several editions. Apart from the Musée Rodin in Paris, they are suitably placed in the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, the Cantor Sculpture Garden at the Stanford University and other places.