The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise

Benjamin West · 1791, retouched 1803

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

48.6 × 72.9 cm (19 1/8 × 28 11/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Neoclassicism

Benjamin West's 1791 depiction of the expulsion from Eden is one of the most quietly devastating treatments of the subject in the Western canon — the figures of Adam and Eve caught mid-collapse beneath the sweep of the angel's outstretched arm. West was an American-born painter who rose to become court painter to King George III and President of the Royal Academy, a remarkable trajectory for a colonial Quaker from Pennsylvania. He worked in the Grand Manner tradition, bringing a theatrical command of light and compositional weight to biblical narrative, and this canvas shows that instinct at full force. The palette moves from warm, heavenly gold at the top to a darkening earth below, tracing the couple's descent in colour as much as form. West returned to the canvas in 1803 to retouch it, suggesting he regarded this as a living work rather than a finished object — a rare act of revision for a painting already more than a decade old. A hand-painted oil reproduction preserves what a print never can: the layered depth of the atmosphere, the texture of fabric and skin, and the tonal shifts that only oil on canvas renders with full weight.