Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is an oil painting on canvas by Thomas Cole, painted in 1828 and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (47.1188). It measures 100.96 by 138.43 cm and is signed T Cole on the cliff at the lower left.

Cole showed it in 1828 at the National Academy of Design in New York, of which he was a founding member, together with its companion The Garden of Eden, now in the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. Writing to his patron Robert Gilmor, he said these submissions aimed at a higher form of landscape painting. According to the MFA they did not sell at the show, but the museum and Google Arts & Culture note that the picture helped establish Cole as one of the most gifted artists in the United States, and Gilmor's support led on to his European travels and to Luman Reed's commission for The Course of Empire.

The subject is the Genesis story of Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise after eating the forbidden fruit. Where earlier artists expressed their anguish through pose and gesture, Cole tells the story through landscape, dwarfing the two figures. The composition is split down the middle. On the right lies Paradise, lush and tropical under a clear sky; at the centre a blinding shaft of light, standing for God's power, streams through a rocky gateway and seems to push the couple out across a stone bridge. On the left the outside world is dark and violent, with a smoking volcano, blasted trees, a wolf attacking a deer and a vulture overhead.

The painting was bought in 1829 by the New York physician David Hosack, passed through his family, and in 1849 was acquired by the collector James Lenox. It later belonged to the New York Public Library, which sold it at Parke-Bernet in 1943. Maxim Karolik acquired it that year, and Martha C. Karolik gave it to the MFA in 1947.