Studies of legs for 'Eve Tempted', ca. 1884

George Frederic Watts RA (1817 - 1904)

RA Collection: Art

On this sheet are two studies of a pair of legs relating to Watts's painting 'Eve Tempted' (1884, Tate Britain). The pose in both studies is very close to the finished painting in which Eve's left leg is straight but her right leg bends at the knee as her upper body sways towards the apple tree. This posture was designed to embody a sense of Eve's 'entire weakness'.

'Eve Tempted' was the second in Watts's trilogy of paintings on the subject of the first woman. The artist dispensed with the traditional symbols of the Fall, such as the serpent. Mary Seton Watts, the artist's wife, wrote that in this painting 'the sway of the senses...descended upon the soul, the figure is bowed, enmeshed, enthralled; the head thrown back in a sort of abandonment to the overpowering scent of flowers and luscious fruit: the paradise of sense has developed a lower ecstasy'.

The inscription on the sheet, 'Miss S.', almost certainly refers to a Miss Smith who, according to Mary Seton Watts, modelled for 'Thetis' (c. 1866-9, Watts Gallery). Ellen Smith, a Chelsea laundry maid who worked as a model in the 1860s, sat for both Rossetti and Watts (see Staley 1978, and Franklin Gould ed. 2004 ).

Further reading:

Mary Seton Watts, George Frederick Watts - The Annals of An Artist's Life, London, 1912, Vol. II, p.141 and 44-5

Allen Staley et al, Victorian High Renaissance, exhib. cat., Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978, cat. no. 15, p. 70-71

Veronica Franklin Gould ed., The Vision of G F Watts, The Watts Gallery, 2004, cat. 51, p. 64