Wikimedia Commons.Īlbert Herter’s golden apples look truly metallic in his Garden of the Hesperides from 1898, with another hefty snake coiling its way around the three women as they slumber. Albert Herter (1871–1950), The Garden of the Hesperides (1898), oil on canvas, 101.6 x 152.4 cm, location not known. There are also two white egrets in the foreground, at the feet of the three languid young women. Wikimedia Commons.įrederic, Lord Leighton followed Burne-Jones in incorporating an enormous python in his Garden of the Hesperides from about 1892. Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896), The Garden of the Hesperides (c 1892), oil on canvas, diameter 99 cm, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool, England. Its central panel reads clearly, but to the left two young men appear to be picking the apples, and to the right a much older man is there with some small children. References are no more obvious in Hans von Marées’ triptych The Hesperides from 1884. Hans von Marées (1837–1887), The Hesperides (1884), wood, 341 × 482 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany. Here it might also allude to the Garden of Eden. That’s a reference to Ladon, the additional guardian placed in the garden by Hera, although that’s more usually considered to be a dragon with a hundred heads. That is until you notice the blue serpent coiled around the trunk of that tree. Wikimedia Commons.Edward Burne-Jones’ The Garden of the Hesperides from 1869-73 is more in accord with the consensus view: three classical maidens holding hands as they dance around an apple tree whose fruit is potentially golden in colour. I’m not sure how this came about, nor the artist’s literary reference.Įdward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), The Garden of the Hesperides (1869-73), tempera, gouache and oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 119 x 98 cm, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Wikimedia Commons.Ĭuriously, Cornelis van Haarlem’s painting of The Hesperides Filling the Cornucopia from 1622 makes no reference to golden apples, but to filling the Horn of Plenty with a wide range of fruit and other produce. Cornelis van Haarlem (1562–1638), The Hesperides Filling the Cornucopia (1622), oil on canvas, 68.7 x 99 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts / Musée des Beaux-arts de Montréal, Montreal, Canada. It appears that these golden apples were added at a late stage in the painting, which increases the uncertainty over Raphael’s intention. Those could just be a reward for each virtue, but might refer to the fruit of Hera’s orchard. My earliest ‘modern’ painting of what may be the Hesperides is by Raphael, and is normally taken to show The Three Graces (c 1502-03), but they are strangely each holding a golden apple. Eris proved something of an understatement. It was one of these apples which Eris, goddess of Discord, made the prize for the Judgement of Paris, so leading to the Trojan War. There does seem to be agreement on one salient fact about them: they live in a garden somewhere ‘in the west’, where they tend Hera’s orchard which grows golden apples.

Boccaccio names three as Aegle, Arethusa and Hesperthusa, but there are many alternatives. Neither is there agreement over their number, which ranges between three and seven. This is by no means agreed, and some claim that they were the issue of Atlas and Hesperis, or Hesperus. Like the Fates, in some of the classical cosmogonies the Hesperides are daughters of Nyx, primordial goddess of the night.

Hesperides apple