Premier Deuil

What you are looking at

Adam sits on a low rock with Abel's body draped across his knees. The dead youth's head hangs back over his father's thigh, mouth slack, one arm trailing so that its fingertips nearly brush the ground. Adam clutches his own chest with one hand and leans his bearded face down against Eve, who kneels beside him and buries her face in her hands and in his shoulder. Both parents are nearly nude, wearing only rough skins; Abel wears a loincloth. Behind them stretches a flat, empty plain under a heavy grey storm sky, with a low band of light along the horizon.

The detail most viewers miss is at lower right: a small dark pool of blood on the stone beneath Abel's dangling hand. It is the only sign of violence in the picture. Bouguereau leaves the cause of death, Cain's attack, entirely off stage and shows only what follows.

How it was painted

The canvas is large, over two meters high and two and a half wide, and the figures are close to life size. It shows Bouguereau's academic method at its most polished: smooth, invisible brushwork; anatomy studied from posed models; skin modeled in warm and cool tones so that Abel's body reads as cold and pale against Adam's ruddy, sunburned flesh. The composition is a tight pyramid of three bodies, and the knot of limbs at its center, Adam's arm, Eve's hands, Abel's head, is where the emotion concentrates.

The story and its meaning

The subject comes from Genesis 4, where Cain kills his brother Abel. Scripture says nothing of the parents' grief; the image of Adam and Eve finding their son's body developed in later art and literature. Bouguereau's arrangement deliberately recalls the Christian Pietà, with Abel laid across a parent's lap like the dead Christ, and Abel was traditionally read as a type of Christ, the innocent victim.

Bouguereau had lost several of his own children by the 1880s, and the painting is often linked to that experience, though he left no statement about it. Shown at the Paris Salon of 1888, it is one of his few tragic subjects in a career better known for idealized nymphs and peasant girls.

Where to see it

Premier Deuil is in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For other treatments of the first murder, see Gustave Doré's The Death of Abel; for more by the painter, see William-Adolphe Bouguereau and The Birth of Venus, and our guide to death in art.