The Expulsion from Paradise

An angel with a sword drives Adam and Eve out of the garden, and they try to cover themselves as they go, the last lines of the third chapter of Genesis. Around them stand the animals of the paradise they are losing. Coxie painted it around 1550 as the partner of his Fall of Man, and the two tall panels are usually described as the wings of a triptych whose centre is lost. How they reached Vienna is better known. They belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, who governed the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels between 1647 and 1656 and bought paintings there on a vast scale. When he returned to Vienna in 1656 his collection came with him, and it became one of the foundations of the imperial picture gallery that hangs in this building.