Denunciation of Adam and Eve (Study in Colour)

Painting height: 61 cm
Painting width: 25.4 cm
Frame height: 87 cm
Frame width: 50 cm

This is a study for the painting which is the pendant of Creation of Eve (1881-1882, COMWG.11) and the vertical composition completely reverses the narrative of the former as the figures of the now denouncing angels can be seen, arms outstretched in a blaze of anger, condemning the pair, who are now wearing fig leaves to cover their nakedness.

Perhaps it is the trunk of the fig tree we see in the background, at the root of which they sit huddled together. Although, it should be said that in the final composition it curiously looks more like a juniper tree [1]? Watts’s unorthodox biblical imagination is exemplified here. As F. G. Stephens wrote in 1887, while the painter had frequently ‘illustrated Holy Writ’ he had never ‘touched on doctrine’ nor ‘produced what in conventional terms is called a devotional picture.’ [2].

It may perhaps not have been a conventional devotional picture, but Watts intended his chronicle of Adam and Eve to be part of his unrealised House of Life scheme, Watts’s Sistine Chapel, which Mary described as ‘an assemblage of symbolic pictures—to show the happiness that might result if the higher human aspirations could be realised’ and, as in this picture, ‘beside these the degradation consequent upon the disobedience to divine laws’ [3].

When the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy Retrospective after Watts’s death, it was ‘readily picked out for most distinguished quality’ [4]. Another critic observed that this composition in which the denouncing spirits flicker ‘like some conflagration in the dust’ at the same time depicted a novel ‘sanctity’ which ‘reconsecrates humanity’. Through Watts’s compassionate portrayal of the cowering figures of Adam and Eve as pity ‘is born; Adam’s arms are out-held to shelter the bowed head of’ Eve ‘under the anathema of the spiritual blast’ [5].

Explore:

Creation of Eve (COMWG.11)

Footnotes:

[1]    See the finished composition

[2]    F. G. Stephens, ‘George Frederick Watts, Esq., R.A., L.L.D.’ in The Portfolio 18 (Jan 1887), pp. 13-19, p. 14.

[3]   Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 319. On Watts’s unrealised schemes for the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, and the House of Life see also Julia Cartwright, ‘George Frederic Watts’ in The Monthly Review (Aug 1904), pp. 23-40.

[4]   Anon. ‘The Royal Academy Winter Exhibition’ in The British Architect 63.1 (Jan 6, 1905), pp. 2-3, p. 2.

[5]   Anon. ‘Exhibition Catalogues of the New Gallery, 1897; Royal Academy, 1905; Tate Gallery, &c., &c.’ in The Edinburgh Review 202.413, pp. 29-55, p. 42.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius