Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise

Ensor painted this in 1887, the year before his vast Christ's Entry into Brussels, when fossil finds and a young science of prehistory were pushing the earth's story back far beyond the six days of Creation. He took the oldest expulsion scene in Christian art and quietly loaded it with that doubt. Adam and Eve are tiny here, almost lost. What fills the huge canvas is light, a storm of yellow and white pouring off the angel who drives them out. He lifted the sweeping composition from lithographs made for Milton's Paradise Lost and borrowed the angel's raised arm from Michelangelo. And along the far horizon, where you would expect nothing, three faint pink mammoths are wading through the new-made world.