Gallery

Cain wanders forsaken in the wilderness to which the Lord banished him in this 1977 work by the Australian painter Sir Sidney Nolan.

In happier times, Cain had tilled the earth like his father Adam. But the Lord spurned Cain’s offerings in favor of those of his herdsman brother Abel, so Cain murdered Abel out of jealousy. As punishment the Lord condemned him to be “a wanderer, a fugitive on the earth” (Genesis 4:14), never again to enjoy the fruits of the land.

For medieval writers like the anonymous author of Beowulf, Cain represented the prototypical monster—spawn of Satan, begetter of monsters like Grendel who haunt the wild fens and prey on the innocent. But modern artists have tended to sympathize with Cain’s plight, the seeming senselessness of God’s rejection of his offering and his sad banishment. The poet Baudelaire, for instance, saw the “Race of Cain” as representing the unloved, poor and downtrodden of the world, in contrast to the fortunate but undeserving “Race of Abel.” And Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fragment, “The Wanderings of Cain,” took pity on the young Cain, toiling alone in the moonlight:

It was a climate where, they say,

The night is more belov’d than day.

But who that beauteous Boy beguil’d,

That beauteous Boy to linger here?

Alone, by night, a little child,

In place so silent and so wild—

Has he no friend, no loving mother near?