Page 6 - Richard Kenton Webb: John Milton's Paradise Lost

Introduction

Since its first publication in 1667, John Milton’s Paradise Lost has fired
the imaginations of artists around the world.

Breathtakingly ambitious, the poem tells the biblical story of Adam
and Eve’s expulsion from Eden in over 10,000 blank verse lines,
exemplifying what Samuel Johnson called Milton’s ‘peculiar power
to astonish’.

Generations of artists have interpreted the poems in different ways:
John Baptist Medina’s emblematic line engravings in the 17th century;

Gustave Doré’s Romantic etchings in the 19th; and Mary Groom’s
sensuous wood engravings and Ian Pollock’s striking colour illustra -
tions in the 20th, to name but a few.

A mythic work, Paradise Lost dramatizes the most profound moral
and metaphysical questions facing humanity. But the poem also
speaks intensely and personally to individual artists. For William Blake,
the poem fuelled his visionary identification with Milton himself.

For Amer ican artist Carlotta Petrina, Adam and Eve evoked the lost
intimacy between herself and her late husband.

Richard Kenton Webb’s Conversation with Paradise Lost is a remark -
able contribution to this visual tradition, fusing the mythic and the
personal in a manner all of its own.