The Fall of Man

The Fall of Man by Hugo van der Goes depicts Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden — the moment of eating the forbidden fruit — a subject that required the painter to convey both the beauty of the unfallen world and the tragedy of its loss within a single image. Van der Goes was among the Flemish painters who brought the greatest psychological depth to this subject, rendering Adam and Eve not as idealized types but as specific, anxious individuals on the verge of an irreversible choice. His version of the Fall, painted in the 1470s when his late period works were pushing toward an emotional intensity unprecedented in Netherlandish painting, gives the garden a melancholy beauty that anticipates its imminent loss.

Van der Goes renders the garden with extraordinary botanical precision — individual plant species accurately depicted — while the figures of Adam and Eve are treated with the same intense close observation. His oil technique gives the foliage a lustrous, almost tactile quality, and the flesh of Adam and Eve a warm luminosity that makes their vulnerability painfully apparent.