Perhaps one of the most famous of the Lilith images, Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted “Lady Lilith” (1863) with special emphasis on the deadly sensuality of Lilith. It is perhaps best described by H.C. Marillier:

A beautiful woman, splendidly and voluptuously formed, is leaning back on a couch combing her long fair hair, while with cold dispassionateness she surveys her features in a hand mirror. . . She herself was a serpent first, and knows the gift of fascination. Bowered in roses, robed in white flowing draperies that slip and reveal the swelling contour of her bust and shoulders, no painter has ever captured like this the elemental power of carnal loveliness.

The painting is accompanied by a poem by the artist titled “Body’s Beauty”:

Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told

(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)

That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could deceive,

And her enchanted hair was the first gold.

And still she sits, young while the earth is old,

And, subtly of herself contemplative,

Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,

Till heart and body and life are in its hold. The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where

Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent

And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went

Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,

And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

Thirty years after Rossetti’s “Lady Lilith”, John Collier painted his well-known piece “Lilith” (1892), in which Lilith becomes involved with Eve’s snake. It is sometimes assumed that this painting represents Lilith as meet and impressionable – however, notice the look on her face, she is painted knowing exactly what she is doing.

Click here to view a larger image of Collier’s Lilith.



Alan Humm explains the link between Lamia and Lilith as:

‘Lamia’ is Greco-latin equivalent of lilith-demon. The Vulgate uses the term to translate ‘Lilith’ in Isaiah 34.14. For Waterhouse, the distinction between lamia and lilith would have been moot. Here, and in the following picture, she is portrayed as a succubus.

John William Waterhouse’s “Lamia” (1909) was inspired by John Keats’ poem of the same name (1820):

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,

Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;

Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,

Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;

And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,

Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed

Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries–

So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,

She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,

Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.

Not surprisingly in 1985 H.R. Giger also painted Lilith. She made the cover of his book Necronomicon 2 that year.

Click here to view the cover of H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon 2.



