The First Mourning

Bouguereau knew this grief firsthand. Eleven years before he painted this, in 1877, he lost his wife and their infant son to tuberculosis, and he would bury more of his children before the end. The subject he chose is the first death in the Bible: Adam and Eve have found the body of their son Abel, killed by his brother Cain. Bouguereau keeps the drama restrained. There is no violence in the frame, only the aftermath. Adam holds up his collapsing wife while Abel's pale body lies across their knees, limp against a dark and heavy sky. The canvas is over six feet wide, scaled like a religious altarpiece but built around a plain human fact, parents holding a dead child. He sent it out into the world at the great Paris exhibition of 1889.