Expulsion. Moon and Firelight

In the years just before this was painted, the London painter John Martin published his large mezzotints for Milton's Paradise Lost, between 1825 and 1827, dark scenes in which light carries the drama. The museum in Madrid sees their influence here. Thomas Cole had walked in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1827 and seen a natural stone bridge hanging over a drop. In 1828 he exhibited his Expulsion from the Garden of Eden in New York, with Adam and Eve, very small, stepping out of a blazing gateway. This canvas keeps the bridge and the gateway and leaves the people out. Paradise lies in daylight on the right, behind a tower of rock with light blazing inside its arch. The fallen world on the left is night, with a small full moon low over a distant plain. A thin white waterfall drops behind the bridge, and the two meet in the shape of a cross.