Iris is depicted with her right hand clasping her right foot and her naked body posed provocatively with her legs spread wide, displaying her genitalia.

The sculpture was conceived in 1891 as part of Rodin's second (and ultimately unrealised) proposal to create a monument to Victor Hugo for a site outside the Panthéon in Paris.

Rodin received the commission in 1889, and he initially conceived a sculpture of Victor Hugo accompanied by three female figures representing Youth, Maturity and Old Age.

Over time, the project evolved, and the parts of the figures became separate sculptures, including Meditation, Tragic Muse, and Iris.

The sculpture was altered in 1894, when it was enlarged by Rodin's assistant Henri Lebossé [fr] and reoriented vertically, with the left arm and head removed leaving a fragmentary torso similar to that of a damaged statue from Classical antiquity.

Today, the official copies of the sculpture are kept in museums of Oslo, Zurich, Paris, Washington, Basel, New York, Los Angeles and Adelaide.

[1] Iris has been described by the art historian Jane Mayo Roos as "open[ing] her thighs in a pose of candid, aggressive sexuality".

By removing them and repositioning the legs into their current confrontational pose, Rodin erases any sense of individualism in favor of anonymous carnality.