SOUTH GERMAN, CIRCA 1600

Diana Metcalf Stainow (1926-2019) was born and raised in Boston and after her marriage to Gregory Stainow, whom she met in New York, she moved to France, eventually splitting her time between Paris and London. She was a painter with an eye for color and pattern and a profound interest in non-western cultures. Her taste was grounded in her family's American cultural heritage. She was a descendant of Robert Treat Paine, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and a founding member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Her grandfather, Robert Treat Paine II, was a renowned Boston collector who gifted many masterpieces to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Her father, Thomas Metcalf, was one of the founders of the Boston Institute of Contemporary art, formerly called the Boston Museum of Modern Art.

During World War II, the Institute became the home of the Metcalf family who occupied the two top floors of the building; the distinction between private and public space was blurred as local artists, members of the Institute, were welcome in the Metcalf household. During these formative artistic years for Diana – who attended the Boston Museum School – the Institute had an exhibition program striking for its diversity, inclusiveness and daring representation of the vitality of American art during the 1940s in addition to its contemporary European programming. This period was decisive in shaping her approach to collecting which ranged across centuries, cultures and styles. In the '40s The Institute had a first solo show of Georges Rouault and exhibited works by Leger and Maillol – all artists in her collection that are now being sold. Stainow’s idiosyncratic approach was also evident in her elegant apartment in London. With her unique and daring eye she commissioned a graffiti artist to paint the entrance foyer and hung Rouault tapestries and Toulouse-Lautrec Elle prints over the graffiti to striking effect.

This carving of Eve originally formed one half of a pair alongside a now lost representation of Adam. One of her hands would have once held an apple, representing the moment in the Book of Genesis when she offered Adam the fruit from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge thus leading to their banishment from the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.

Representations of Adam and Eve in all media have a longstanding tradition in the history of art as one of the most popular Old Testament subjects. Freestanding polychrome figures of the pair similar to the present lot, albeit on a smaller scale, can be found in collections in the Bavarian National Museum, Munich, and the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf dated to circa 1600 and circa 1610-30 respectively (see Beck and Bol, loc. cit.).

Northern European depictions of Adam and Eve from this period cannot be discussed outside the context of Albrecht Dürer who illustrated the pair in 1504 in his widely-disseminated engraving, and in 1507 in a pair of paintings, now at the Museo del Prado, Madrid. Dürer’s representation of the couple’s interaction, his classicising of the nude figures and the movement instilled into the respective compositions through the positioning of their feet had a profound impact not only on his contemporaries but also successive generations of artists. This was particularly prevalent during the so-called ‘Dürer Renaissance’, a period of renewed interest in - and imitation of - the artist’s work that occurred between 1570 and 1630.