Adam and Eve in Paradise (1509): Art, History and Details

Adam and Eve in Paradise (1509) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lucas Cranach (German, 1472–1553).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Lucas Cranach’s Eden shows the first couple just prior to tasting the forbidden fruit. Adam holds one fruit, and Eve plucks a second from the tree of knowledge. The composition is packed with stags, horses, sheep, and a lion, ram, and boar. Some of these are associated with human temperaments (personality types), but the many stags suggest more hunting ground than significant allegory. Cranach’s patron, Frederick, Elector of Saxony (1463–1525), whose coats of arms hang from the tree, was an avid hunter whose hunting grounds were perhaps a kind of paradise for him.

Object facts

• Title: Adam and Eve in Paradise
• Date: 1509
• Creator attribution: Lucas Cranach (German, 1472–1553)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: woodcut
• Dimensions: Image: 33.5 x 23 cm (13 3/16 x 9 1/16 in.); Sheet: 33.5 x 23 cm (13 3/16 x 9 1/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Woodcut
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1925.115

A detail from the museum

The coats of arms hanging from the tree in this image are those of the artist's patron, Frederick, Elector of Saxony (1463– 1525).

Collection credit

Gift of Ralph King

Further reading listed by the museum

• Parsse, Leona. "Prints by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the Museum Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 24, no. 2 (February 1937): 19-23.
• Peters, Emily J. "Love Gardens/Forbidden Fruit: Nature and landscape before 1600.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 63, no. 2 (2023): 12-13.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.