Jobs and Volunteering

Expand All | Collapse All

Picture of the Month - August 2010

George Frederic Watts (1817-1904)

Eve Tempted, begun around 1868

Oil on canvas, 251.5 x 109.2 cm (99 x 43 in)

Watts Gallery Collection

COMWG142

“Mr Watts,” a reviewer wrote of the artist’s 1905 retrospective at the Royal Academy, “occupied himself much with the Bible story of Paradise, as well he might; nothing could give fuller scope to his genius both as painter and as the poet of humanity.” Through his paintings of such subjects, Watts explored his fascination with the creation and evolution of the spirit of mankind, which formed part of a cycle which in the 1890s became known as The House of Life. Although the scheme to bring the paintings together in one great work never materialised, several individual and groups of works developed out of this grand vision.

The story of Adam and Eve is depicted in a number of works, painted at different points in his career and developed over a long period. Watts had originally conceived of six paintings in the cycle. He wrote to Rickards in 1873 telling him that they “can hardly be separated, any more than one would think of separating the parts of an epic poem, my intention was to make them part of an epic & they belong to a series of six pictures illustrating the story in Genesis… “The Creation of Eve,” “After the Transgression” & “Cain” – 3 single figures, & 3 full compositions. Those I always destined to be public property… I think you will understand that I would keep these designs together and leave them after my death to form part of one whole.” As Watts indicated the paintings divide very clearly into two groups of related compositions. The most celebrated of these became known as “the great trilogy of Eve” as Julia Cartwright described them in 1896, which consists of She Shall be called Woman, Eve Tempted and Eve Repentant.

In She Shall be called Woman, Watts depicts Eve as a single upright figure, ethereal at the birth of her creation, a bridge between heaven an earth, “resembling a rainbow only brighter and purer.” In Eve Tempted and Eve Repentant, Eve is more obviously in the material world and the world of physical senses. The sculptural solidity of Eve’s depiction is emphasised in both paintings expressing in turn, sensuousness and grief. The biblical source for Eve Tempted is Genesis: III, 6, “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat…” If Genesis is the original source, the painting has more than an echo of Milton’s interpretation of the subject in Paradise Lost, a work greatly admired by Watts. “Fixed on the fruit she gazed, which to behold /Might tempt alone…” (Book 9, lines 735-6), Milton writes of the temptation, yet it is the sensuous imagery that follows that is more clearly reflective of the lush nature that Watts paints:

“Thick overhead with verdant roof embowered,

… flowers were her couch,

Pansies, and violets, and asphodel,

And hyacinth - earth’s freshest, softest lap.” (Book 9, lines 1038-1041)

Mary writing of Eve Tempted in the Manchester catalogue notes that “her spiritual nature, lulled to sleep by the opulent beauty around her, the colour and scents of fruit and flower, and the fawning animal life, Eve yields to the tempter.” Watts evokes the intoxication of physical beauty and sensual pleasure, the spirit dulled, leading to the Fall, the moment mankind understands its own weakness, a stage “through which human life has to pass.” The panther, on its back symbolises lust and physical pleasure, Eve is adorned and lost in nature. In Eve Tempted Watts paints the seduction and corruption of the material world, where materialism is viewed as the opposite of the spiritual and a danger to it. It is, as Mary describes it, a “lower ecstasy”, rather than the ‘higher’ spiritual ecstasy of She Shall Be Called Woman. More explicitly, according to the catalogue notes of 1905, Watts is “The moralist “warning in deep tones against lapses from morals and duties”” using “the parable to urge his lesson.”

Mrs Barrington describes Eve, depicted as “…she bends forward toward the fruit which is tempting her, not plucking it, but allowing herself to be allured by its seductive fragrance.” The significance of her leaning was conceived by Watts to be highly symbolic, highlighting the weakness and vulnerability of the stance, pivoting on the point of fall. Furthermore, the “elemental lines…” that make up the stance of each of the Eves in the trilogy were described by Mary, “the first representing perfect strength, the second entire weakness, the third a return to the first but requiring support.”

Mark Bills, Curator of Watts Gallery

A beautifully finished version of Eve Tempted can be seen on display at Tate Britain