Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Hesperides.
The gallery
The Garden of the Hesperides
Frederic Leighton, 1892
Frederic Leighton's tondo (c. 1892, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) gives the Hesperides their most famous Victorian image. Three nymphs of the evening recline beneath the golden apple tree at the western edge of the world, lapped in drowsy harmony while the immortal serpent Ladon coils around the trunk and across their laps to guard the fruit. Leighton renders the daughters of Night not as guardians on alert but as figures of languid, eternal repose — the embodiment of the far western paradise where Gaia's wedding gift to Hera was kept, and the prize Heracles came to seize in his eleventh labor.
The Garden of the Hesperides
Edward Burne-Jones, 1869–1873
Edward Burne-Jones's gouache (1869–1873, Hamburger Kunsthalle) depicts the three Hesperides circling the sacred apple tree in a slow, ritual dance, their linked rhythm echoed by the serpent Ladon spiralling up the trunk behind them. A leading Pre-Raphaelite image of the myth, it imagines the nymphs as tending and singing about the golden apples at the world's western limit — the dwelling of the daughters of Hesperus where the tree of Hera's golden fruit grew, guarded perpetually by the sleepless dragon.
Garden of the Hesperides
Albert Herter, 1900
The American painter and muralist Albert Herter set this Garden of the Hesperides (c. 1900) at the golden tree of the western nymphs. The daughters of Evening move among the laden branches that bore Hera's golden apples, the coiled guardian Ladon never far from the fruit. Herter's decorative, mural-scaled treatment places the myth in the lineage of late-nineteenth-century Aesthetic painting, presenting the Hesperides as keepers of an earthly paradise at the sunset edge of the Greek world.