The first Quarrel

Bouguereau showed this at the Paris Salon in the spring of 1861, as number 316. He took the first murder in the Bible and moved it back into the nursery. Cain and Abel are small children here, with their mother Eve between them. Abel presses into her, frightened, while Cain stands off to one side with his arms locked across his chest and his brow down. Critics went for the sculptural weight of the three bodies, and Théophile Gautier, the most read of them, said the group brought Michelangelo to mind. Bouguereau was 35, and the canvas was bought straight from him by the Durand-Ruel gallery, the Paris firm that would later stake itself on Monet and Renoir. By 1863 it had gone to Limoges, onto the walls of a private gentlemen's club, the Cercle de l'Union.