Charles Mahoney

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

exhibited 1936

© Tate

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Not on display

Artist: Charles Mahoney 1903–1968
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 914 x 762 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1942
Reference: N05323

Display caption

The Garden of Eden is here reinstated as a horticultural fantasy, defined by its relationship with an unseen domestic interior. Mahoney's image of perfection glimpsed from a window was created in the mid-1930s, when the idea of the garden was actually an accomplice of suburbanisation.

Gallery label, May 2003

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Catalogue entry

N05323 ADAM AND EVE IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN c. 1936

Not inscribed.
Oil on canvas, 36×30 (91·5×76·5).
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1942.
Coll: C.A.S., 1941.
Exh: N.E.A.C., 1936 (199), as ‘Adam and Eve’.
Lit: Herbert Furst, ‘Standards of Criticism’ in Apollo, XXXVI, 1942, p.15, repr. p.16.
Repr: Studio, CXXIV, 1942, p.12.

Hitherto catalogued as ‘The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden’.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II

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architecture(42,289)
- features(9,152)
  - window(1,066)
- garden structures(1,973)
  - garden(1,217)
emotions, concepts and ideas(16,926)
- universal concepts(6,508)
  - idyll(53)
nature(46,524)
- animals: birds(1,333)
  - bird - non-specific(465)
- animals: mammals(5,151)
  - horse(1,705)
- landscape(26,714)
  - wooded(8,610)
- plants and flowers(2,760)
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  - plant(357)
- trees(3,337)
  - palm(196)
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