Heaven and Hell (c. 1850): Art, History and Details

Heaven and Hell (c. 1850) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Octave Tassaert (French, 1800–1874).

The work and its context

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

This painting focuses upon the struggle between good and evil for the soul of a young woman. Looking out at the viewer, she is shown in the upper center of the composition, immediately below an angel and directly above Satan. At the upper right Saint Michael—holding scales for weighing the goodness of souls—admits the blessed to Heaven. Below, the Damned struggle to avoid the fiery pits of Hell and the demons that will torment them for eternity. At the time Tassaert painted this work, France was undergoing considerable political upheaval. In 1848, the country was wracked by a civil war between royalist and republican forces. Tassaert himself believed strongly in the Republic, and probably intended the young woman—caught between the sensual, worldly temptations of royalist excesses and the noble, pure ideals of the Republic—to personify the country of France.

Object facts

• Title: Heaven and Hell
• Date: c. 1850
• Creator attribution: Octave Tassaert (French, 1800–1874)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 121 x 90.5 x 6.5 cm (47 5/8 x 35 5/8 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 100 x 69.5 cm (39 3/8 x 27 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.287

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European paintings of the 19th century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1980." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163-219.

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.