In Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, a vast painted scheme depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden covers the walls, arched coving and ceiling of the Grand Staircase. The artist, William Nicholson, drew on his experience in stage-set design to produce a strange, blanched grey-green composition which envelops the space on all sides with fauna and flora. A monstrous tree of knowledge, with branches stretching across the three walls, has an encyclopaedic range of birds on its limbs and animals gathered around it. The eye is drawn to the angry angel and the cowering Adam and Eve to which he points across the space, both picked out in red and flesh tones. 

The theme chosen for such a prominent mural in this miniature royal home is unusual, as the story of Adam and Eve is about a fall from grace. In The Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House (1924), William Newton discusses the air of gloom and foreboding about the composition, which seems to say ‘Beware, be not too sure […] Even in the house of kings’. It is interesting to note that, in an earlier letter regarding the Dolls’ House, Edwin Lutyens discussed the possibility of a more conventional scheme which would show the ‘Triumph of the Crown’.