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Lilith | John Collier | 1889

Lilith | John Collier | 1889

€55,95
€55,95
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About the artwork:

In Lilith (1889), John Collier presents a striking reinterpretation of the biblical and mythological figure as a calm yet unsettling embodiment of forbidden autonomy. Lilith stands nude against a dark, almost primordial background, her pale body rendered with Pre-Raphaelite clarity, while the serpent coils around her arm in a gesture that feels intimate rather than threatening. Collier strips the scene of overt drama and instead emphasizes psychological tension: Lilith’s detached gaze and relaxed posture suggest self-possession, not guilt, transforming her into a symbol of resistance to patriarchal and religious authority. The painting blurs the line between innocence and danger, beauty and transgression, inviting the viewer to question whether Lilith is a seductress, a victim of demonization, or simply a woman who refused submission. Through this quiet yet provocative composition, Collier aligns Lilith with late-Victorian anxieties about female independence, sexuality, and the fear of women who exist outside moral and social control.

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  • Title Lilith
  • Artist The Honourable John Maler Collier OBE RP ROI (English portrait and subject painter, working in a late Pre-Raphaelite style; London, 27 January 1850 - London, 11 April 1934; son of the lawyer and politician Robert Porrett Collier, 1st Baron Monkswell; pupil of Edward Poynter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and J.P. Laurens)
  • Year of creation 1889 (note that several sources, including the English Wikipedia entry, give the date as 1887 — the work was already discussed in the British Architect's review of that year. The painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The composition was directly inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet "Body's Beauty" of 1868 — which formed part of his The House of Life sequence and was originally written as the verse accompaniment to his own painting Lady Lilith — describing Lilith as "the witch he loved before the gift of Eve," whose magnificent tresses gave the world "its first gold" but whose beauty was a weapon and whose charms were deadly. Collier portrays Lilith as a golden-haired, porcelain-skinned, voluptuous nude who fondles on her shoulder the head of an enormous serpent coiled around her body in a passionate embrace, against a deliberately repulsive coarse-green forest background. The British Architect's reviewer described it in 1887: "Here is a nude woman, whose voluptuous, round form is most gracefully represented, surrounded by a great serpent, the thickest part of which crosses it horizontally and cuts it in half; her head slides down her chest and she seems to be pulling it in tighter coils. The background is a coarse kind of green, repulsive and abominable." Collier — son-in-law of Thomas Henry Huxley, and a portraitist of the late-Victorian scientific establishment — was working in a self-consciously late Pre-Raphaelite idiom; the subject combined classical mythology, Talmudic and Kabbalistic legend [in which Lilith is Adam's rebellious first wife, created from the same earth and refusing to lie beneath him], and a fin-de-siècle erotic fascination with the deadly female that would soon be more fully embodied by Stuck's Sin and the Symbolist femme fatale)
  • Technique/Medium 194 x 104 cm (76 ¼ x 40 ¾ inches)
  • Original dimensions 194 x 104 cm (76 ¼ x 40 ¾ inches)
  • Collection/Museum Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport, Merseyside, England (accession no. BOOAG:188; transferred from Bootle Art Gallery in the 1970s)

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