Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise

Around 1850 Eugène Delacroix made a pencil drawing of Adam and Eve driven out of Eden, with the angel close behind them. He took the composition from this little picture, which was already in the Louvre, and swapped the two figures so that Eve walks nearer the angel. The drawing is now in the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Cesari painted the scene in oil on a sheet of copper about half a metre high. It follows the end of the third chapter of Genesis, when God sends the first couple out of the garden and bars the way back. The composition was clearly in demand, and the Louvre knows of at least three other versions. The museum dates its own copy only broadly, to the last quarter of the 16th century. Other sources place it around 1597, when Cesari was in his late twenties and already one of the most sought-after painters in Rome.

The picture belonged to the prince of Carignan, a member of the house of Savoy, and later to the prince of Conti, a prince of the French royal blood. At the Conti sale in 1777 it was bought for Louis the Sixteenth.