Cain

This picture belongs to the years when Europe was discovering its own deep past. In 1879, the year before it was finished, painted bison were found on a cave ceiling at Altamira in northern Spain. Cormon took his subject from the Bible by way of Victor Hugo, whose poem La Conscience has Cain fleeing after the murder of his brother Abel, his children dressed in animal skins. The opening lines were quoted as the painting's subtitle. On a canvas four by seven metres, that becomes a tribe crossing a bare plain. The grey-haired old man out in front is Cain. Behind him his sons carry a wooden stretcher with a frightened woman and sleeping children on it, beside bloody cuts of meat. Hunters and dogs follow. The painter had a live model pose in his studio for every figure.