Symbolist School, Circa 1890 – Eve In The Garden Of Eden

Symbolist School, circa 1890
Eve in the Garden of Eden

Pastel
100.5 × 69.5 cm
With frame: 120 × 86 cm

Provenance:
London, Bonhams, November 28, 1996, lot 28;
Private collection, United Kingdom;
Private collection, France.

A remarkable Symbolist pastel depicting Eve in the Garden of Eden, captured at the moment she reaches out toward the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Kneeling in a lush green landscape dominated by mauve mountains, the young woman faces the serpent, whose powerful deep blue and emerald green coils wrap around the trunk.

The work is particularly distinguished by its highly elaborate use of pastel. The flesh tones are built up through a succession of fine, curved hatches in shades of cream, pink, yellow, and blue-green, which envelop the forms and lend the body a particularly original luminous quality. The deliberately idealized landscape, with its slender trees, rounded shrubs, and intense colors, fully contributes to the composition’s dreamlike atmosphere.

With its biblical subject matter, decorative character, and deeply evocative language, the work is part of the world of late 19th-century European Symbolism. In particular, it can be compared, on an iconographic level, to the depictions of Eve by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, as well as to the imagery developed by Franz von Stuck around the female figure and the serpent.