The Temptation and Fall of Eve

Eve bends her head towards a serpent whose body has already circled her. One hand supports its raised neck; the other rests against a thick coil passing across her hips. Her feet remain close together inside another loop on the ground. The contact at her mouth is tiny beside the creature's enormous length, yet everything in William Blake's The Temptation and Fall of Eve draws attention towards it. The fruit appears between two mouths, making the act of eating resemble an intimate exchange. ^[1]

Across the tree, Adam lifts empty hands. His face turns upwards and away from Eve, towards a sky divided by lightning. The pair inhabit opposite sides of one trunk, close enough for the viewer to compare their bodies but unable to meet each other's eyes. Blake gives the disaster two very different forms of attention: Eve's concentration on the creature beside her and Adam's troubled response to something extending beyond his reach.

A larger return to the subject

The watercolour shown here belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession 90.99, and dates from 1808. The Morgan Library & Museum's lender caption describes black ink and watercolour over graphite on paper, with a sheet measuring 49.7 by 38.7 centimetres. The Boston museum's contribution to Google Arts & Culture confirms the date and dimensions and identifies the medium more briefly as pen and watercolour on paper. These descriptions concern the same upright sheet. ^[1][3]

It belongs to Blake's Butts illustrations to John Milton's Paradise Lost. The William Blake Archive distinguishes this 1808 project from the Thomas set of 1807 and the later Linnell drawings of 1822. Those names identify separate undertakings, and a familiar composition can change significantly between them. The broader history of the Paradise Lost illustrations establishes their relationship; here the differences become visible in a single tree, a serpent and the positions of two human bodies. ^[2]

The tall format gives the tree an almost architectural role. Its canopy fills the upper corners, its trunk divides the standing figures, and its roots spread to the bottom edge. Fruit hangs above them in an abundance that makes the small portion at Eve's mouth seem almost negligible. Blake makes that disproportion uncomfortable: a whole garden surrounds an action whose consequences will transform the garden itself.

Ink gives the serpent's scales and the tree's jagged contours a particular insistence. Watercolour carries lighter transitions through Eve's abdomen, Adam's back and the distant landscape. Against those softly modelled bodies, the creature's patterned surface remains continuously legible. Its weight appears to pass around a waist, across a thigh and down towards the feet, allowing the eye to follow the enclosure almost as a physical route. ^[1]

A body inside the serpent's curve

The serpent shares Eve's standing height before extending far beyond it. At her feet, the lower coils make a broad, uneven ring. Higher up, the body crosses in front of her and then rises into the long curve she supports with her left hand. That upper loop leaves an opening through which the dark background remains visible. Its elegant shape can momentarily look like an ornament held for admiration. Following it downwards restores the sense of a living body wrapped around another.

Eve's hands complicate the embrace. Neither hangs loosely, and neither pushes the serpent away. Her right hand rests against the coil near her hip, while the other receives the creature's raised neck. The pale human fingers meet a surface articulated with dark scales. These points of touch distribute the encounter through her whole posture, so that the mouth becomes the culmination of a relationship already established elsewhere in the body.

Milton gives Blake an imposing serpent. In Book IX it approaches upright upon rising folds, with a crested head and a burnished neck of greenish gold. It attracts Eve's attention through movement before it speaks. Blake preserves that height, brilliant surface and elaborate curvature, but the coils around Eve give the approach a new bodily consequence. The figure who in the poem watches the creature perform has become the person enclosed by its performance. ^[14]

The distinction becomes sharper at the fruit. Milton's Eve reaches out, plucks and eats. His serpent then retreats while she continues tasting. Blake holds serpent and woman together at the decisive contact, putting the fruit at the creature's mouth. That substitution changes the visible direction of the gift. The poem gives Eve a hand reaching towards a tree; the picture places a living intermediary immediately before her lips. ^[14]

The Huntington's catalogue reads the corresponding contact in the smaller 1807 version as a parody of the lovers' earlier kiss in the sequence. That interpretation makes the serpent's closeness more disturbing: an action associated with affection has acquired another partner and another purpose. It also remains a reading of a repeated gesture, rather than evidence that Milton described this mouth-to-mouth exchange. ^[15]

Blake's serpent retains an attraction essential to the encounter. The long gold body, red crest and assured curves catch the eye before the viewer has decided what to make of them. The danger does not depend on ugliness. A form can be beautiful to look at while the relationship it establishes becomes increasingly constricting. Eve's exposed skin and small, gathered stance allow both impressions to coexist.

What the serpent's body leaves unsaid

The painting compresses a long process of persuasion. Milton first lets Adam and Eve discuss how to work in the garden. Eve proposes dividing their labour; Adam worries about their enemy and argues for mutual assistance. She hears his concern as a doubt about her constancy. Their disagreement concerns work, freedom, trust and the value of virtue tested alone. It gives her subsequent isolation an intellectual and emotional history. ^[14]

The serpent then supplies apparent evidence for its promises. It claims that eating the fruit produced its power of speech and reason. Eve can hear a beast speaking, so the false explanation attaches itself to a real marvel. At the tree, the tempter argues that the threatened death cannot be true, suggests that the prohibition maintains ignorance and invites her to imagine becoming divine. Appetite enters the scene alongside that argument: the fruit appeals to sight, smell and hunger. ^[14]

Eve thinks before she eats. Her reasoning accepts the serpent's story, questions the prohibition and mistakes its seeming friendliness for proof of good intent. Reading the speech alongside Blake's picture gives the small interval between the mouths another kind of duration. The silent contact can carry the remembered pressure of words, desire and expectation without displaying any of them separately. Her bent head is the concentrated endpoint of a process the poem takes time to unfold.

Genesis provides a shorter account. The serpent challenges the warning of death and promises opened eyes; the woman sees fruit desirable for food, appearance and wisdom. The chapter identifies the forbidden tree as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It does not specify an apple. Blake's hanging yellow and orange forms belong to his rendering of the scene, while Milton's own language includes apples within his much fuller temptation narrative. The biblical text and the poem therefore offer distinct levels of description. ^[16][14]

The erotic force of Blake's contact need not reduce the episode to a claim that sexuality itself caused the Fall. Genesis ends its second chapter with the pair naked and unashamed, before the transgression. Milton's ninth book distinguishes the exhilaration and sexual appetite following the fruit from the shame and mutual recrimination that follow their troubled sleep. Desire changes within the narrative; the mere existence of two naked bodies does not explain their guilt. ^[16][14]

Adam's responsibility also remains essential. Milton explicitly distinguishes his later eating from Eve's deception. He understands her transgression and chooses to join her condition because he cannot bear separation. Whatever tenderness a reader finds in that resolve, it is a further decision. The picture's intense focus on Eve should not make the man at the left disappear from the story's moral action. ^[14]

Adam across the tree

Adam's broad back occupies much of the left side, while Eve faces more towards the viewer. His raised hands open towards the sky; hers remain low and close to the serpent. Their differently directed gestures make the trunk's division palpable. Neither figure can answer the other through the exchange of a look or a touch. The serpent has immediate bodily access to Eve while Adam's response remains suspended at a distance. ^[1]

A small fallen garland gives that response a history. In Milton's poem Adam makes flowers into a crown for Eve's hair while awaiting her return. Apprehension sends him to meet her. When she tells him what has happened, shock relaxes his limbs and the flowers drop from his hand. They belong first to an anticipated welcome, then become the fragile remains of it. ^[14]

The smaller Thomas watercolour at the Huntington, accession 000.10, dates to 1807 and measures 25.4 by 20.8 centimetres. In that picture Adam still holds the garland between his raised hands. In Boston's larger version, flowers lie on the ground beside him. The change is documented in the Huntington's comparison and visible when the sheets are placed together. In both sheets Adam remains upright, with his face raised and his back turned towards us. ^[15][1]

The tree also changes. In the Thomas sheet, a comparatively smooth, broad trunk rises above exposed roots and bare earth. In Boston, clustered stems and sharp projections make the tree more intricate, and short grass covers parts of the ground beneath Adam. The serpent's lower coils gather more tightly beneath Eve instead of spreading so far across the foreground. These revisions draw her feet into a smaller enclosure and make the tree's surface feel closer to the thorny world below. ^[1][15]

The two versions alter the reader's sense of time. A garland still held can belong to apprehension before complete knowledge; its abandonment points towards the later shock Milton describes. Yet Eve continues meeting the serpent. Blake brings together actions that the poem separates, allowing the viewer to read the event and its human consequence across one surface. Its simultaneous arrangement lets us experience a relationship between events whose unfolding Milton gives separately. ^[14]

The contrast also gives the tiny flowers an unusual importance. They compete for attention with an immense serpent, vivid fruit and lightning, but they concern a recognisably human preparation: someone has made something for another person's return. Their position near the roots brings that expectation down to earth. The serpent's splendid offering and Adam's discarded gift occupy the same garden, with radically different consequences.

The garden feels the wound

Around the central trunk, branches and roots repeat one another in a system of pointed extensions. The canopy bends down around the figures; below, roots reach outward across ridged ground. Some bear conspicuous thorns. The tree appears to gather the whole page into itself, linking the offered fruit above with the earth beneath Eve's feet. Its structure makes the enclosing serpent part of a larger pattern of restricted space. ^[1]

The sky extends that disturbance. Pale lightning cuts through dark areas on both sides of the trunk. The bolts near Adam's hands make his lifted arms seem suddenly exposed; another descends beside Eve towards the distant ground. Beyond her, a small opening into landscape remains visible, but reaching it would require an imaginative passage out of the dense foreground. Blake preserves distance while making the immediate garden feel crowded by consequence.

Milton gives nature two responses. At Eve's eating, the earth feels wounded and nature sighs. After Adam eats, the earth trembles again, the sky darkens and thunder accompanies the completed human transgression. The two passages give the painting's storm a wider duration than the single instant at Eve's mouth. It can make the wider injury visible while joining the two falls within one charged setting. ^[14]

Genesis places thorns among the consequences pronounced upon the ground. Blake has already made them prominent around the tree at the moment of temptation. Their presence can make the future seem to have entered the garden early, just as the fallen garland brings Adam's later knowledge beside Eve's immediate act. The picture repeatedly lets consequence occupy the space of the event that produces it. ^[16]

The Huntington catalogue reports Martin Butlin's interpretation of the Boston lightning near Adam's hands and foot as anticipating Christ's wounds and eventual redemption. That proposal adds a future beyond the disaster. The museum's discussion offers this as a possible connection between the visible lightning and the human history still to come. ^[15]

Such a possibility changes the duration of looking without cancelling the picture's distress. The forms that announce injury may also invite thought about its eventual answer. Blake keeps those large questions attached to small visible relationships: an empty hand, flowers on the ground, lips touching fruit, feet held inside a coil. The Fall acquires its force through the changed possibilities of contact.

The earlier Satan Exulting over Eve offers a separate encounter with a serpent-bound human body. ^[15] Here, within the Milton watercolours, Blake makes the enclosure stand beside Adam's isolation and the garden's disturbance. Looking back from the lightning to Eve's supporting hand, the creature's grace becomes harder to separate from its grip. That unresolved experience gives the image its lasting unease.