Lilith

In 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, John Collier was one of London's busy establishment portrait painters, a man who even wrote handbooks on how to paint a proper likeness. That same year he produced this, a life-size nude woman winding a large snake around her body with obvious pleasure. She is Lilith, a figure from old Jewish legend said to have been Adam's first wife, made from the same earth as him and therefore unwilling to obey him. Having left Eden, she was recast as a demon of the night. Collier gives her long red hair and a serpent whose coils she seems to welcome, an image of the dangerous woman the Victorian imagination kept returning to. His description of her hair leans on a poem by his older contemporary Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The painting hangs in a gallery in Southport, on the Lancashire coast.