TNQ E-Exclusive:
Adam and Eve in A Blanket
by Brian Bartlett
During the years when a witch’s malicious laughter unnerved me each time my family played a narrated LP of Sleeping Beauty, I also began my fear-fraught relationship with a painting of Adam and Eve fleeing the Garden of Eden. Half a century later I still recall the mix of fascination and dread stirred up by the dark painting in my grandparents’ living room in Saint John, by curly-haired, half-naked Adam running with long-legged Eve dressed in diaphanous white. Over their heads they held a single cape, maybe as protection from both an impending storm (one lightning stroke in the dark distance) and the wrath of God. A many-tiered golden frame contrasting with the painting’s black background increased the sense of illuminated danger. This was far from the consoling pastel colours of illustrations in the Sunday School papers I knew so well. The only other work of art I recall haunting me during elementary-school years was an engraving of a twisting, amphibious Leviathan in the Books of Knowledge.
Many years later, unsure whether my fears had been unique, I learned that most of my five brothers and sisters had also felt spooked by our grandparents’ painting. My older brother says that in his memories the painting’s view of the expulsion from Eden connects to our grandfather’s monologues –– when my brother was a fledgling student of the History of Ideas –– about another momentous departure, of the Israelites from Egypt. Grampie Wills, secretary of a Masonic Lodge for many years, insisted that descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel lived in Northern Protestant Europe, to which he felt ancestral, spiritual kinship. One of my younger brothers says that his memory mixes the Eden painting in with other elements of our Saint John visits: the Irving pulp-and-paper mill’s sulphurous stink hanging over the whole city, his fears of meeting with our gentle grandmother’s disapproval, and, later, her prolonged, terrible suffering from the most joint-deforming arthritis we’ve ever witnessed. I don’t recall ever feeling nervous around her, maybe because we bonded early on as fellow readers. In my eleventh year she gave me books she’d bought second-hand in the 1930s, including my first collections of stories by Hawthorne, whose Puritan-tormented fiction dives deep into themes of sin, guilt, and thwarted redemption. (But Grammie also gave me a book about Mozart and a little biography of Dickens “by his Eldest Daughter”; and she owned a book of Whitman’s poetry, her reading tastes not especially Gothic.)
In January 1976, by which time our grandparents’ painting had likely lost its hold over my imagination, I visited New York for the first time. In one of the spacious rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, I stopped in my tracks, stunned: dream-like, on the wall in front of me hung an enormous canvas, many times larger than the one in the familiar flat in Saint John, but otherwise apparently the same. No moment in any gallery I’d later visit in London or Edinburgh, Florence or Venice, Brussels or Amsterdam, would be as simply shocking as that moment. The shock wasn’t one of aesthetic excitement. It arose from the abrupt revelation that the family painting was a copy of a brighter, far more imposing original. Morever –– just as startling –– Adam and Eve had nothing to do with it. A wall plaque told me that the painting’s title was The Storm; its date of creation, 1880; its painter, Pierre Auguste Cot. In the Met gift shop I found a postcard reproduction –– the image now downright minuscule –– and mailed it to my grandparents. Oddly, I now can’t recall whether they were surprised by my find. Had they known all along that their painting was a copy, and that it had no association with the Book of Genesis? Had they even known that my siblings and I had seen Adam and Eve every time we’d stepped into their living room?
On the day when my grandfather, having lived longer than his wife, was buried, I inherited their copy of The Storm. In the next week I transported it as carry-on, protected with newspapers and packing tape, on the overnight train from New Brunswick to my flat in Montreal, where it hung for several years before its move back to the Maritimes and to my apartment, then house, in Halifax. At some point the postcard I’d mailed from New York also ended up in my hands; as it rests on the desk now as I type, I wonder why I left the back blank except for my grandparents’ address, why I didn’t scribble something like Does this look familiar? In the bottom left of their version of The Storm, where P. A. Cot is painted in the original, the name J. E. Price appears. I’ve only the vaguest memory of Grammie Wills saying that she got the painting from someone in her native state of Maine –– a Mrs. Price, I’d imagined –– but I can’t find anyone in the family with a parallel memory. In recent years, I’ve learned of speculations that the original might’ve been inspired by the myth of Daphnis and Chloe; of Cot’s fame encouraged by the Academie des Beaux Arts (which rejected the genius of Cezanne, Manet, Monet, and Renoir); and of the painting’s popularity well into the twentieth century, as well as critics’ increasing disdain for it as establishment art. I’ve found it attacked in John Canaday’s What Is Art? (1980) as “a flossy bit of picturemaking concerned with second-rate values,” its young man and woman “frozen forever on tiptoe, continuing to suggest models posed in the studio.”
For a few years my grandparents’ painting has been wrapped in a blanket and stored in a closet. When I look now at the couple’s faces I don’t see fear but bland blankness, a puzzling composure, and their bodies are posed too symmetrically for any sense of vitality to emerge. Yes, the eroticism of the girl’s legs and hips under the unlikely thin fabric may be kitschy. Yes, when viewed on-line Cot’s Ophelia looks untragic, his Dionysia unDionysian, and his Spring coy. Yes, all private associations with the image felt diminished when I read that a “Storm” t-shirt is available from www.zazzle.ca, and that each year the Met makes $70,000. from selling reproductions of Cot’s original. Still, this morning when I slid my grandparents’ painting from its blanket, rested it on a chair in the dimly lit living-room, and stood a good distance from it with my eyes half shut, for a few moments I was eight or ten years old again, tempted yet hesitant to stare into an ominous vision of primal disgrace and flight.
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