Lilith by John Collier: The First Woman and the Serpent (1889)
She does not look at you. She looks at the snake. A pale nude figure stands against a dark green thicket, her long golden hair falling over her shoulders, while a huge serpent coils around her body from ankle to throat and rests its head on her shoulder. John Collier's Lilith (1889) turns the first woman of Jewish legend, Adam's rebellious first wife, into one of the most memorable images of late Victorian painting. It hangs today in the Atkinson Art Gallery in Southport, on the north-west coast of England.
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Artist: John Collier (1850–1934)
Date: 1889
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 194 × 104 cm
Collection: The Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport (transferred from Bootle Art Gallery in the 1970s)
Notable fact: Collier's Lilith embraces the serpent of Eden, merging two figures that legend had long linked
Who was Lilith?
Lilith does not appear as Adam's wife in the Bible. The word lilith occurs only once in the Hebrew scriptures, in Isaiah 34:14, among the wild creatures that haunt a desolate land, and translators have rendered it as "night creature", "screech owl" or simply "Lilith". Her fuller story comes from later Jewish tradition. The best-known version is found in the medieval text known as the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which tells that God made Lilith from the earth at the same time as Adam. Because they were created equal, she refused to submit to him, spoke the secret name of God and flew out of Eden.
In later folklore she became a night demon, a danger to newborn children and to sleeping men. By the nineteenth century, however, European poets and painters had found a different Lilith in her: not a monster but a woman who would not obey, older than Eve and more dangerous because she was beautiful.
What does the painting show?
Collier keeps the composition simple. The tall, narrow canvas, almost two metres high, is filled by a single standing figure. Her body turns towards us, but her head bends to rest against the snake's head, and her eyes are closed or lowered. The serpent winds around her legs and hips, crosses her back and rises to her shoulder, so that woman and animal form one continuous shape. Behind them there is no garden, no Adam and no sky: only a dense, dark wall of foliage that makes the pale skin and the gold of her hair glow.
The effect is intimate rather than menacing. In most paintings of the Fall the serpent tempts a woman towards sin. Here Lilith holds the serpent as if it were a companion, even a lover. Collier does not show a temptation about to happen. He shows a bond that already exists.
Why a snake?
The link between Lilith and the serpent of Eden is old. Medieval and Renaissance artists sometimes painted the tempter in the Garden with the head or upper body of a woman, and some later interpretations identified that female serpent with Lilith, the first wife taking her revenge on the couple who had replaced her. Collier goes one step further. Instead of turning Lilith into the snake, he gives her the snake: the two figures are separate, but they belong together. For a Victorian audience, that pairing would have summed up the idea of the femme fatale, the woman whose beauty is her power.
Rossetti's Lilith and the Pre-Raphaelite world
Collier was not the first English painter to take up the subject. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Lady Lilith in 1866–68, showing her combing her hair in front of a mirror, and wrote a sonnet about her, later titled "Body's Beauty", in which her "enchanted hair was the first gold". Collier had studied in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens and at the Munich Academy, and he was known above all as a portrait painter, but he also painted women from legend and literature in a style close to the Pre-Raphaelites. His Lilith shares Rossetti's idea of a golden-haired seductress, yet the style is different: instead of an ornate interior, a bare, dark background; instead of a clothed beauty at her mirror, an open nude in the wild.
The same fascination with women from old stories runs through Collier's other work, including his unsettling Sleeping Beauty of 1921, a fairy-tale subject painted with the same cool realism.
Where to see it today
Lilith first belonged to the Bootle Art Gallery near Liverpool and was transferred to the Atkinson in Southport in the 1970s. The Atkinson, on Lord Street, combines an art gallery, museum, theatre and library; not every work is on display at all times, so it is worth checking with the venue before a visit. The painting remains one of the best-known images in its collection and one of the most reproduced Victorian nudes.
Why Lilith still fascinates
Part of the painting's lasting appeal is that it can be read in more than one way. For some viewers it is a warning in the Victorian manner: beauty allied with the serpent. For others, Lilith is a figure of independence, the woman who left paradise rather than obey. Collier does not settle the question, and that is why the image still works. Other painters of the period explored the same tension between beauty and danger, from Cabanel's Birth of Venus to Falero's reclining nudes.
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Related on @SapiensVerbum: watch our video commentary on Lilith (in Spanish).
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