Fine Canvas Art Blog

Guardian of Paradise by Franz von Stuck, 1889

Paintings (Reproductions) / Von Stuck - 2 years ago - troycapc

From the King James Version of the Old Testament Book of Genesis:

“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

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In this, his first renowned painting, Von Stuck portrays the “Guardian of Paradise” who bears the flaming sword described in the above biblical passage. Von Stuck ignored the Ezekiel tradition: portraying a cherub as having four faces (lion, ox, eagle, man), four wings, the hands of a human and the feet of an ox. Instead he maintains the Symbolist reliance on dream images and imagination to portray a sexually ambivalent yet intriguingly powerful figure guarding the garden. The original is in the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich.

The Artist:

Franz von Stuck began attending the Munich Academy in 1881 at the age of eighteen, having been born the son of a miller in the Bavarian countryside. Leaving the academy four years later, he attracted attention with his cartoons in Fliegende Blatter, a humorously illustrated German weekly. He exhibited his first paintings in 1889 at the Munich Glass Palace and won a gold medal for this piece, Guardian of Paradise.

In 1893 he was one of the founders of the Munich Secession, a group of Munich artists who protested against the predominant artist association. They issued their catalog on July 15 and their secession was followed by the secession of artists in Vienna, Berlin and other cities. Von Stuck gained further fame with his first sculpture, Athlete, and earned a gold medal for painting in Chicago. He was appointed to a royal professorship and gained yet more recognition with his most famous painting, The Sin, in 1894. Three years later he married an American widow and began to build the “Villa Stuck.”  The furniture he designed for this house and studio later won a Gold Medal at the 1900 Paris World Exposition. He was ennobled in 1905 and continued to win honors and provide leadership as a professor at the Munich Academy until his death in 1928.

Symbolism:

Guardian of Paradise is a brilliant example of the Symbolist movement. Symbolism, as applied to the visual arts, is related to the literary movement of the same name, which began in the mid-nineteenth century and was influenced by the works of Edgar Allen Poe. In the visual arts, it began as a more esoteric and lurid outgrowth of Romanticism. Symbolists reacted against naturalism and realism, which they thought devalued spirituality, imagination and dreams. They continued the mystical tendencies of some of the Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich and John Henry Fuseli, concentrating on religious, philosophical and mythical subjects. They portrayed these subjects in paintings that utilized personal and often ambiguous symbols, frequently borrowing from dream imagery.