The Expulsion from Eden

Spencer Stanhope painted 'The Expulsion from Eden' in 1900, one of his latest major works, returning to the foundational narrative of Western literature — the moment in Genesis when Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden of Eden by the angel with the flaming sword. The Expulsion had been one of the great subjects of European painting from Masaccio's heartbreaking fresco at the Brancacci Chapel through Michelangelo and beyond, and Spencer Stanhope's engagement with it at the end of his career represents both a personal and art-historical reckoning with this tradition. By 1900 he was working between England and his Florentine villa, fully absorbed in the Florentine Quattrocento aesthetic that had shaped his mature style. The Walker Art Gallery's panel preserves this late ambitious work. The Expulsion subject — loss of paradise, the beginning of human time and suffering — resonated with Spencer Stanhope's persistent meditation on beauty's relationship to sorrow.

Painted on panel in oil, the work takes advantage of the support's smooth surface for the precise, detailed handling appropriate to the subject's historical and iconographic weight. Spencer Stanhope's mature Florentine-influenced style is fully apparent: elongated figures, decorative treatment of angelic attributes, and a compositional clarity that privileges the emotional core of the narrative — the couple's departure — over dramatic incident.