The Garden of Eden

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This panel was one of a set of three valances probably used to decorate the tester of a bed. Small elements—fruits, flowers, and leaves—were worked in tent stitch on canvas and then applied to the dark velvet foundation on which was worked the river in the Garden of Eden, the figures of Adam and Eve, and God the Father, in polychrome silk and metal threads. The garden is monumental, almost overwhelming the figures. The three trees that anchor the composition would have brought to mind the biblical description of trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The scene of Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden on the far right may also derive from a reading of contemporary vernacular English Bibles, rather than any pictorial convention. Adam and Eve wear garments that suggest articles of late Elizabethan dress and the Geneva Bible of 1560 referred to their first clothes as "breeches." In this and other embroidered renderings of the story of the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve are treated more gently by God and the expelling angel than they are in contemporary print sources.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art