Denunciation of Cain

Painting height: 147 cm
Painting width: 68.6 cm
Frame height: 180 cm
Frame width: 98 cm
Frame depth: 5.5 cm
Frame depth: 6.5 cm

Like his mother, Eve, Cain was one of the central Biblical figures of Watts’s career. A pillar of fire rises from the altar of Abel, behind Cain who is standing over the body of his brother Abel, as the denouncing spirits descend on the murderer who cowers beneath them. For god accepted Abel’s offering, who was a keeper of sheep, rather than Cain’s, who was a tiller of the ground (Genesis 4:2-5). This is a preparatory study for the huge canvas that was given to the Royal Academy, following Watts’s election in 1867. [4] The painting’s original title was ‘My Punishment is greater than I can bear’, a quote taken from Cain’s argument with God in Genesis 4:13 following the murder of his brother Abel, but is now known as the ‘Denunciation of Cain’.

As he wrote in a letter to Edward Butler, in Cain he saw a ‘symbol of reckless, selfish humanity (always killing his brother)’ [1]. In another letter, he wrote of, how in the story of Cain one finds

the grasping of riches to the hurt of others, or in indifference to others; in the building of houses unfit for dwelling in; in the polluting of streams without regret; in short, in the absence of sympathy with the weaknesses of our fellows [2].

As the Swiss poet and painter Salomon Gessner (1730-1788) in his epic Death of Abel (1761) and Lord Byron (1788-1824) in his dramatic poem Cain (1821), Watts was so struck by what Mary called ‘this early record of a crime’, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, that he thought it should be the ‘subject of a great cantata’ [3]. It became part of his House of Life scheme that was intended to be an epic of mankind inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

The arid landscape in blue tones is typical of Watts’s Biblical pictures, as seen in The Prodigal Son (1873), shown at the Royal Academy the year after Cain’s Denunciation [4]. The dominant colour of this study, however, is the red. The Wattsian red, that ‘tremendous autochthonous red’, as G K Chesterton called, which was ‘the colour of Adam, whose name was Red Earth’ [5]. To Chesterton, it was the distinctive red of ‘the clay in which no one works, except Watts and the Eternal Potter’ [6]. While Cain seems to share the colour of the red clay of the ground, Abel’s pale body is similar to the angelic spirits. In the final painting, the giant body of the angelic Abel recalls Watts’s Apollo in the fresco for Carlton House Terrace (1854-55), and the painting of Hyperion (1881).

While the finished painting was met with mixed criticism it was praised by the British poet and critic Cosmo Monkhouse (1840-1901) when this study was exhibited in 1882 as ‘that most tremendous vision of the wrath of heaven descending upon Cain’ [7]. Watts used a similar vertical composition for two pendant paintings: The Creation of Eve (COMWG.11, 1881-1882) and The Denunciation of Adam and Eve (COMWG.59, 1873). In 1878 in All the Year Round, a visitor to the Royal Academy in 1878 noted that the painting ‘enjoys the distinction of being the biggest picture, in square feet, of the diploma exhibition’ [8].

Footnotes:

[1]    Quoted in Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts Vol I (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 260.

[2]    Ibid., p. 260.

[3]   Ibid., p. 258.

[4]   For a review see Anon. ‘Another Visit to the Royal Academy Exhibition’, in The Builder 31.1580 (1873), pp. 377-378, p. 377

[5]   G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904), p. 129

[6]   Ibid., p. 129.

[7]    Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘The Watts Exhibition’ in The Magazine of Art 5 (Jan, 1882), pp. 177-182, p. 182.

[8]   Anon. ‘Royal Academy Diploma Pictures’ in All the Year Round 20.482 (Feb 23, 1878), pp. 108-113, p. 112.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius