Black-framed print of a muscular green lion standing on snow-covered rocks among winter pines, biting a golden sun with a calm human face, in engraved-style detail on black.

The Sun Devourer — Born of the Longest Night | Framed Print

12" x 16" (Vertical) / Matte / Black Frame
$59.00
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Black-framed print of a muscular green lion standing on snow-covered rocks among winter pines, biting a golden sun with a calm human face, in engraved-style detail on black.
  • Black-framed print of a muscular green lion standing on snow-covered rocks among winter pines, biting a golden sun with a calm human face, in engraved-style detail on black.
  • Black-framed print of a muscular green lion standing on snow-covered rocks among winter pines, biting a golden sun with a calm human face, in engraved-style detail on black.
The Sun Devourer — Born of the Longest Night | Framed Print

The Sun Devourer — Born of the Longest Night | Framed Print

$59.00
Size
PaperMatte
ColorBlack Frame

The lion closes its jaws around the sun.

Green gathers in the mane like the deep color of a forest at dusk. The sun keeps its human face. Around them, snow lies on the rock and the winter pines stand still.

The green lion devouring the sun is one of alchemy's best-known images. Here we give it a winter setting and our own reading: light passing into the body of the beast, carried beneath the dark surface of things.

What appears to vanish may be entering another form. For those doing the hidden work: the season within the season, the fire beneath the green.

Inspired by

The Rosarium philosophorum (Rosary of the Philosophers) was printed in Frankfurt in 1550 with twenty woodcuts. It became one of the most-quoted texts of European alchemy. One of its images shows a lion devouring the sun. The green lion swallowing the sun is now counted among the classic emblems of the art.

Alchemists rarely explained their pictures plainly, and the image has many readings. A common one is that the sun stands for gold, dissolved in a powerful solvent (the green lion) so that its seed can be freed and the work begun again. Rome hailed the midwinter sun as Invictus, unconquered. The alchemists imagined a sun that has to be swallowed before it can be renewed.

For the one who knows that what seems lost is often only changing form.

Details

  • Sizes: 12 × 16 in / 16 × 20 in (vertical)
  • Black solid-pine frame, matte finish; clear plexiglass front
  • Matte paper print; no mat. The art sits on a deep black field. About ¼ in at each edge sits beneath the frame lip, and the composition is set back to allow for it.
  • Arrives fully assembled and ready to hang, with hangers fitted
  • Printed and framed to order in the US or Canada. Ships to US addresses only.

Artwork by Shawn Neville.

Made with AI assistance, following human aesthetic, mythic and historical direction.