Rodin's iconic sculpture The Thinker goes on display in Walsall

Auguste Rodin's The Thinker has made a temporary home at the New Art Gallery Walsall as part of the Rodin: rethinking the fragment exhibition.

The Thinker was conceived to sit high up on Rodin's The Gates of Hell, the doors designed for a decorative arts museum in Paris that was never built. The inspiration for the sculpture included one of the most celebrated sculpture fragments to survive from antiquity, the Belvedere Torso.

Julie Brown, collections curator at New Art Gallery, said: "We are delighted to be able to show Rodin's The Thinker as part of the British Museum's Spotlight loan which brings key national works to three regional galleries across the UK.

"It is particularly fitting in this, the 60th anniversary of Sir Jacob Epstein's death, to have Rodin's The Thinker on display in our permanent Garman Ryan Collection galleries as Rodin was an artist greatly admired by Epstein.

"The gallery is fortunate to have two of Rodin's works featured in the Garman Ryan Collection, a watercolour study and bronze head, which are shown as part of this display."

The Thinker had various identities – first it was Minos, judge of the damned in Dante's Hell. Then Dante contemplating the Underworld and finally it became the artist himself as creator.

In 1903, Rodin enlarged the figure to make a monumental work, which gradually became a universal symbol of a thinking man. One of the numerous casts of the large-scale model was placed on Rodin's own grave.

The French sculptor Rodin was a radical and innovative artist who challenged the rules of contemporary sculpture, with his most important legacy the idea that a fragment – an incomplete figure or even an isolated hand – could be a work of art in its own right.

The Thinker will be on display at New Art Gallery Walsall until April 28.