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Adam and Eve
(Adam et Ève)
(1899); cast 1905
Medium
bronze
Measurements
139.8 × 54.7 × 64.6 cm
Credit Line
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1922
© Public Domain
Gallery location
19th Century European Paintings Gallery
Level 2, NGV International
About this work
Although Albert Bartholomé’s majestic yet melancholy Adam and Eve was cast in 1905, the artist appears to have been working on the concept for many years. In August 1897 his good friend Edgar Degas wrote to enquire whether the project’s Adam was ‘far or near’, and ‘a savage or an Italian’ in feel. By 1899 the art critic Léonce Bénédite, writing in Art et décoration, was describing the sculpture as a finished entity, informing readers that Bartholomé’s ‘most recent work, modelled in the course of this year as a diversion from his
labours at Père Lachaise, is an Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, which awakens one’s memories of Masaccio’. Bénédite was presumably referring to the plaster from which this bronze version was cast. The pose of Bartholomé’s exiled couple does indeed relate closely to Masaccio’s depiction of Adam and Eve in his celebrated fresco of the Expulsion from Paradise, c.1426–28, in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence. Having started his career as a naturalist painter in the manner of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Bartholomé turned
to sculpture after the death of his first wife in 1887; his earliest significant work in the medium was her tombstone. Grief and memorials seemed aligned with sculpture for Bartholomé, whose principal artistic legacy is his Monument to the dead at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Executed over a period of ten years
(1889–99), this major symbolist interpretation of the journey to the afterlife is a work rich in references to Egyptian and medieval funerary monuments.
Artwork Details
Inscription
cast in outside rim above base l.r.: 1905 / Bartholomé CIRE / PERDUE / A.A. HEBRARD
Accession Number
1224-3
Department
International Sculpture
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited