American Art Collaborative

“. . . as for her nudity---she does not appear to know that she is so.” The artist, quoted in April Kingsley, Hiram Powers’ Paradise Lost, Exhibition Catalogue, 198
Eve Tempted was Hiram Powers’s first full-length ideal statue. It shows Eve contemplating an apple in her hand while a serpent lingers at her side. American audiences in the nineteenth century felt that statues and paintings of nude figures were scandalous, but Powers maintained that “clothing would be preposterous, for [Eve] was naked only after she had fallen.” Her pensive expression anticipates the consequences of her actions, which the artist described in his later piece, Eve Disconsolate