Adam and Eve Mourning the Death of Abel

Genesis tells how Cain killed his brother Abel, and says nothing at all about their parents' grief. The mourning scene was supplied later, by writers and painters. Here Adam sits hunched with his arms folded tight, looking down at his dead son, while Eve rests her head on her hand beside a rock. Abel lies stretched across the foreground, the first human death in the Bible.

Lubin Baugin painted the scene between 1650 and 1655 on a sheet of copper about half a metre high. A Paris sale of 1818 may have described this very picture: Adam and Eve, overwhelmed by the sharpest grief, weep for their son Abel. In March 2023 it came up at an auction in Toulouse, and the Louvre used the French state's right of pre-emption to take it at the hammer price. It hangs in room 911.