Death of Cain also known as Angel Removing the Curse of Cain

Painting height: 63.5 cm
Painting width: 35.6 cm
Frame height: 75 cm
Frame width: 46 cm

A few years after painting the Denunciation of Cain (1872) for the Royal Academy, Watts imagined the death of the condemned wanderer of Genesis in the Death of Cain (c. 1872-1875). After the murder of his brother Abel, Cain was sentenced to a life as a wanderer, although it should be said that Cain does not do much wandering in the Old Testament account. He goes to live in the land of Nod, where he founds the first Biblical city named after his son Enoch. In this study for the painting, Watts went beyond the life of Cain as narrated in the Bible to imagine his death on the altar of Abel

His earlier work that dealt with the story of Cain and Abel from Genesis Chapter 4, had been met with some criticism. A reviewer in the Examiner complained that there was ‘comparatively little originality or freshness in the conception of Mr G. F. Watts’s large mythological or allegorical work on the first murder’ [1]. It was compared unfavourably to his earlier Angel of Death that had been shown at the Dudley Gallery the year before. The critic thought that Watts had only ‘slightly modifies the traditional treatment of this subject’, and the picture was great but ‘only in a technical sense’ [2]. The landscape was thought to be ‘powerfully delineated’ and the drawing of the figures was considered ‘masterly’ [3]. Yet, to this critic, it appeared as ‘a grand imitation’ rather than ‘an original work’ [4]. Perhaps as a consequence of such reviews, when Watts returned to the subject matter he imagined a scene of Cain’s life that was more original and which is not in the Bible, i.e. the death of Cain, who has returned to the altar of Abel to repent [5].

This painting still feels new and intriguing. In 1886, Watts gave the Death of Cain to the Royal Academy. That year the Royal Academy showed both pictures. One visitor, the Welsh feminist writer and philanthropist Emily Pfeiffer (1827-1890) was so moved by the paintings that she wrote three sonnets inspired by Watts’s work [6]. On the figure of Cain repentant and the angel, of which we can only make out the arms in this study, who sweeps away the cloud of sin that has hovered over the wanderer all his wearied life, she wrote:

‘Black to the heart and calcined to the bone,

With love that desolates and fills no sphere,

The barren love that holds the sole self dear,

Which makes the hell wherein it reigns alone;

So wanders Cain till self to self is grown,

A spectre which, in flying, he falls sheer—

Bowed to God’s all-consuming breath—a mere

Dumb sacrifice on Abel’s altar-stone.

The lo, the cloud that darkened all his day

And hid the watchful angel of God’s love,

The angel’s stormy hand has rent away;

Pure light of life beats on him from above,

Cool tears of dawn make soft his hardened clay,

And heal the frenzied heart God’s lightnings

rove [7].

Footnotes:

[1]    Anon. ‘The Royal Academy’ in The Examiner 3354 (May 11, 1872), pp. 478-479, p. 478. In 1897, the art historian and editor Joseph Gleeson White was a bit more appreciative in his review of a visit to the Diploma Gallery. See Gleeson White, ‘The Diploma Gallery Re-visited’ in The Ludgate 4 (May 1897), pp. 64-67, p. 66.

[2]    Ibid., p. 478.

[3]   Ibid., p. 478.

[4]   Ibid., p. 478.

[5]   It had been imagined in literature though as in the eighteenth century poem inspired by the Swiss poet and painter Salomon Gessner’s epic Death of Abel (1761): The Death of Cain, in Five Books; After the Manner of the Death of Abel. By a Lady. (Dublin: Chamberlaine, 1790), which appeared in several editions throughout the nineteenth century.

[6]   See Emily Pfeiffer, ‘Cain and Abel: Three Sonnets suggested by Three Designs by G. F. Watts, R. A.’ in The Academy 731 (May 8, 1886), pp. 327-327. She also composed sonnets in response to the paintings Hope, Love and Death and Love and Life (COMWG.175, 1880-1889). See The Anthem Anthology of Victorian Sonnets Vol. IV 1877-1888 ed. by Michael J. Allen (London: Anthem Press, 2011). For a biography of this remarkable woman see Jessica Hinings, ‘Pfeiffer [née Davis], Emily Jane’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

[7] Emily Pfeiffer, "Cain Repentant," The Academy 731 (May 8, 1886), pp. 327.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius