Creation of Eve

Painting height: 117 cm
Painting width: 43.2 cm
Frame height: 128.5 cm
Frame width: 54.5 cm
Frame depth: 5.5 cm

Watts painted Eve more times than any other woman in the Bible. This vertical composition was used for other biblical motifs too, as seen in the Denunciation of Cain (1871-1872, COMWG.76), Adam and Eve’s son, as well as the inversed pendant of this painting: Denunciation of Adam and Eve (1873, COMWG.59, COMWG.162). In this painting, Eve emerges out of a swirling tower of angelic figures and clouds. The reclining Promethean naked figure of Adam already rests on the ground next to her, and his body seems to already be weighed down with the burden of the coming Fall. As it says in Genesis, ‘And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slep; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.’ (Genesis 3:21-22).

Or, as Mrs Russell Barrington would have it, one of the angels can be seen ‘touching Adam with a finger to arouse him from his torpor’ echoing Michelangelo’s fresco of Adam and God at the moment of creation. Michelangelo’s frescoes of the Sistine Chapel were perhaps Watts’s greatest source of inspiration throughout his life [1].

In Watts’s disorienting vertical composition of whirling fabrics and clouds, we can see Eve emerging as if taken from the sleeping Adam’s ribcage. Thus, Watts’s Eve comes into being, so begins the Eve-cycle between ‘the sleep of man and the flight of angels Eve is drawn forth into being, one hand still grasped in the strong clasp of the last of the heavenly ministrants’ [2].

Furthermore, this is also another of Watts’s biblical pictures which relies on what the critic and writer G. K. Chesterton identified as Watts’s ‘tremendous autochthonous red, which was the colour of Adam, whose name was Red Earth’ [3]. Chesterton wrote that it was ‘the clay in which no one works, except Watts and the Eternal Potter’ [4]. To Chesterton they were colours of an extraordinary simplicity, for they were ‘like things just made by God’ [5]. It is difficult to impart just how highly regarded Watts was as a colourist by for example George Clausen, Roger Fry, and the art historian Julia Cartwright. But Chesterton’s assessment gives some indication. He wrote that Watts was so ‘individual’ in ‘his handling that his very choice and scale of colours betray him’ as the author of his works, regardless of whether they bear his name or not [6]. Chesterton speculated, as if describing the present glorious study by Watts where the colours are of a jewel-like quality or Watts’s paintings Chaos (COMWG.143, 1875-1882) and The Titans (COMWG.109, 1848-1875), that ‘from the mess on his palette’ one would be able to see ‘giants and the sea and cold primeval dawns and brown earth-men and red earth-women lying in the heaps of green and whites and reds, like forces in chaos before the first day of creation’ [7].

Footnotes:

[1] Mrs Russell Barrington, G. F. Watts; Reminiscences (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905), p. 133.

[2] Anon. ‘Exhibition Catalogues of the New Gallery, 1897; Royal Academy, 1905; Tate Gallery, &c., &c.’ in The Edinburgh Review 202.413 (Jul 1905), pp. 29-55, p. 40.

[3] G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1904), p. 59.

[4] Ibid., p. 59.

[5] Ibid., p. 59.

[6] Ibid., p. 59.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius