In Paradise
Hans Thoma
Hans Thoma the artist
An appealing subject
Between 1876 and 1901, Thoma repeatedly revisited the subject of “paradise”, painting five versions on this theme.
Not only did he choose different aspects of the biblical narrative for each version, but also sought to find a specific artistic means of expression for each of them. Furthermore, he composed works exploring the figures of Adam and Eve in greater depth.
Living in “paradise”
The Kunsthalle Karlsruhe painting here depicts a time of perfect peace among animals and between humans and animals, the subject also found in Thoma’s first “Paradise”.
This primordial golden age is based on two written sources. Described in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament, it appears as part of the Creation story. Once the world is populated with plants and animals, the Creation culminates in God making the first humans on the sixth day: Adam (Hebrew for “man”) and Eve, the progenitors of humankind.
The second written source is found in God’s words in the Book of Isaiah, also part of the Old Testament. The prophet Isaiah describes the world in the coming Kingdom of God where all animals live together at peace, with predators and their prey alike feeding on plants. Isaiah juxtaposes wild and domesticated animals:
“The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened steer together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox”.
A world without sin
Hence, in Thoma’s painting Adam and Eve have not yet been driven out of Paradise. The world is still in perfect harmony, without sin. In keeping with the Book of Isaiah, Thoma shows natural predators and their prey at peace.
The animals are arranged in twos and set against a background landscape rendered in shades of green, where even the trees and the rivers appear in pairs.
In the central foreground, Adam and Eve are framed by groups of trees similarly in pairs and surrounded by exemplary symbolic animals. As in Thoma’s first “Paradise” in 1876, Adam is also depicted in a striding pose.
In contrast, Eve stands in the classical contrapposto posture, at rest with most of her weight on one leg.
Idealised by defamiliarisation
Despite the scene’s pastoral nature, the work seems reduced to a few essential elements, oddly artificial and detached. One explanation for this can be found in Thoma’s biography and the time when the work was painted.
The subject of paradise appears to have been especially important to Thoma, who was a believing Christian. Yet rather than just deriving his religious inspiration from the Bible, he found it in his home region’s countryside as well.
He also took the idea of a familiar mountain landscape for the background of his biblical painting.
Nonetheless, he allowed himself the freedom of populating it with animals, such as a lion or parrot, foreign to central European climes, a defamiliarisation providing him with a means to create the effect described above.
Thoma also broke with realism in his depiction of the human figures. His young Adam and Eve have hardly any specific characteristics. They stand more as representative of their species. In his painting, the male and female human were to be shown in their ideal life, in both an archetypal and supratemporal sense, in the midst of – in Thoma’s view – a perfect natural world.
For modern audiences today, the subtly ascribed gender roles raise a number of issues. But as far as Thoma was concerned, rather than reality being the decisive factor in the reception of his art, it should be judged on the credibility of his artistic vision.
An independent work of art
In the early 1870s, Thoma came into contact with the late Florentine circle of German artists and scholars, and such a view testifies to their intermittent influence. This group not only included the painters Arnold Böcklin and Hans von Marées, but also the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand.
In his view of art as autonomous and subject to its own laws, Hildebrandt followed the ideas of his patron, art theorist Konrad Fiedler, who also purchased a version of Thoma’s Adam and Eve, later acquired by Berlin’s National Gallery. The artists in this loose circle rejected the movements of realism and impressionism, both based on the real world.
Instead, inspired by classical antiquity which was similarly rooted in Italy, they turned to their fantasy to create imaginary worlds with their own expressive potential.
In this spirit, their sole guide was not to be sensory reality, but the artistic ideas they had of that reality – an approach characterising the art movement known as Symbolism, prominent around the 1900s. The formal vocabulary of these artists, though, was not yet the language of Surrealism or pure abstraction, both of which emerged later. Nonetheless, they were already working with forms of idealisation and the universality of an artistic message which each artist determined for themselves and their works.
Basic data
| Title | In Paradise |
|---|---|
| Artist | Hans Thoma |
| Date | 1891 |
| Measurements Plastic | H 98.5cm W 75.5cm |
| Material | Oil on board |