Adam and Eve (Labour: Whan Adam Delved and Eve Span, Who Was Then the Gentleman?)

Sir Edward Burne-Jones|Carl Hentschel

1895 or later · Process print · Drawings and Prints

Burne-Jones designed this composition to serve as a woodcut frontispiece for A Dream of John Ball (1888)—a socialist novel set during the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, written by his friend William Morris. In that context, the image of earth’s first family appears with a medieval couplet: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" The image was reconstituted as Labour for the Daily Chronicle in 1895, about the time this untitled photo-relief was created. Without text, the elegiac image sheds any obvious political meaning. Burne-Jones did not share Morris’s socialism, and the difference often tested their friendship.

Artist

Sir Edward Burne-Jones|Carl Hentschel

Date

1895 or later

Medium

Process print

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1921