Lamech and his Two Wives

Lamech grips his hair with both hands. His elbows spread across the dark sky, his head tilts towards the ground, and his eyes open wide above a heavy beard. Beside him, two women hold one another. Beyond his long garment a naked man lies face down, his golden hair pressed against the earth. William Blake gathers the aftermath of a killing into these few bodies, giving each a different relation to the disaster: the dead man's immobility, the killer's agitation and the women's frightened closeness. ^[1]

The subject comes from Lamech's address to his wives in Genesis, but the picture supplies an encounter far more explicit than the biblical passage. Scripture records his words without describing the women's response or identifying the person killed. Blake gives the speech a corpse, listeners and a landscape. The scene becomes a study of what violence does to a family, while leaving its central narrative question unresolved: whose death are we seeing? ^[1][2]

Tate dates its impression of Lamech and his Two Wives to 1795 and describes its medium as colour print, ink and watercolour on paper. It belongs to Blake's group of twelve large colour-print designs, each capable of producing more than one individually finished impression. This article follows the Tate example, whose pale figures stand against a broad grey-black sky. Its printed colour and drawn detail are integral to the force of the confrontation. ^[1][3]

A confession with an unnamed victim

Genesis introduces this Lamech through Cain's descendants. Cain fathers Enoch; the line continues through Irad, Mehujael and Methusael to Lamech. The descent matters because the chapter begins with Cain's murder of Abel and returns to violence in Lamech's speech. Between the two episodes, generations have passed and human activities have multiplied. Murder has nevertheless remained within the family history. ^[2]

The chapter names Lamech's wives as Adah and Zillah. Adah bears Jabal, associated with tents and livestock, and Jubal, associated with musical instruments. Zillah bears Tubalcain, an instructor of metalworkers, and the text also names his sister Naamah. Domestic relationships, pastoral life, music and metalwork surround the brief announcement of another killing. Lamech belongs to a genealogy of cultural beginnings as well as a genealogy of violence. ^[2]

His address occupies only two verses. He asks Adah and Zillah to listen, announces that he has killed, and compares his protection from vengeance with Cain's:

“If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” ^[2]

Earlier in the chapter, God protects Cain from being killed by declaring sevenfold vengeance against anyone who slays him. Lamech takes up that language and magnifies it. In the sequence of the chapter, the numerical escalation can sound like an assertion of greater power or immunity. Yet Blake's figure looks profoundly disturbed. The visual experience of the print therefore complicates a reading of the speech as an uncomplicated boast. ^[1][2]

The King James wording also places injury close to the act of killing: Lamech speaks of having slain a man to his wounding and a young man to his hurt. Tate's modern display caption renders the act as killing in response to injury. Neither wording names the victim. The paired references to a man and a young man do not, by themselves, provide the detailed story sometimes attached to the picture. Blake shows one visible dead body; a second unseen victim should not be supplied merely to complete a preferred explanation. ^[1][2]

There is another Lamech in the following chapter. Genesis 5 traces the line through Seth and names Methuselah's son Lamech as Noah's father. He speaks about relief from labour on the cursed ground. Blake's subject is the Lamech of Cain's line, husband of Adah and Zillah, whose father is named Methusael in the King James text. Keeping the two genealogies separate prevents the killing scene from becoming an episode in Noah's immediate family. ^[2]

What Blake makes visible

The corpse occupies the lower right of the image. Its arms extend along the ground, while the downward turn of the face removes any exchange of looks with the living. The body lies behind Lamech's standing figure, although the head and shoulder remain plainly visible. Blake makes the dead man's pale flesh stand out against the dark ridge behind him. The extended arms and hidden face make his helplessness emphatic. ^[1]

Lamech's garment forms a tall, narrowing column near the centre. It falls from his upper body in long folds and gathers around his visible foot. Above it, the raised arms create a broad horizontal shape. That sudden widening makes the head feel caught between the hands. He is physically upright, yet the bent neck, strained face and backward sweep of the elbows give his stance little composure. ^[1]

The movement of his hands is particularly forceful because it turns inwards. They grasp his own hair instead of reaching towards the dead man or the women. His distress occupies his body. The corpse receives no touch, while the women find contact with each other. These three kinds of bodily relation organise the scene more clearly than any setting or accessory could do. ^[1]

Blake gives the women a single compact outline on the left. The woman in front turns her head towards Lamech. Behind her, the other face remains visible over a shoulder, with a different tilt and an outward, troubled gaze. Their overlapping arms and draperies make it difficult to separate every contour at once. The embrace conveys their shared exposure to the event without making their responses identical. ^[1]

Their names are established by the biblical subject, but neither the visible image nor Tate's commentary securely assigns Adah to one position and Zillah to the other. Keeping the positional description open also allows the women to be seen more attentively. The front figure's turned profile attends to the man; the rear figure's exposed face gives the viewer another point of entry. Both occupy the receiving end of a speech in which Lamech demands to be heard. ^[1][2]

Long garments connect the living figures to the ground. Their pale, sharply articulated folds descend almost continuously, whereas the dead body's exposed limbs run across the picture. Blake uses the difference between upright drapery and horizontal flesh to distinguish those who must respond from the person who can no longer act. The women's closeness provides a small area of bodily support within an otherwise divided group. ^[1]

A landscape without explanation

A narrow strip of mottled green, yellow and brown earth supports the figures. Beyond it, low dark slopes descend towards a dip on the right. The sky expands over that hollow and grows especially dense behind Lamech's raised arms. Very little in the landscape offers a way out of the immediate encounter. There are no buildings or crowds to absorb it into a larger scene. ^[1]

At the far left a broad pale, curved form passes behind the women. Its sweep helps enclose their group and contrasts with the heavy darkness behind the man. The image does not require a secure identification of this form to make its compositional work apparent. It brings a light area to the edge, turns the eye back towards the women and strengthens their separation from the open darkness on the right. ^[1]

The restricted colour makes the small warm accents conspicuous. Golden hair links the women with the dead man, while Lamech's darker beard gives his face a heavier surrounding mass. The green ground is almost the only substantial departure from the greys, pale flesh and muted garments. Looking across these colour relationships, we encounter a family assembled within a common atmosphere, although its members have become painfully isolated from one another. That is a visual reading of the Tate impression, rather than a fixed symbolic code for each colour. ^[1]

The clipped corners are another immediately visible feature. They interrupt the rectangular field and give the composition a shaped perimeter. The sky, pale left form and foreground each meet that boundary differently. The scene feels deliberately enclosed, but the cut corners do not identify a specific meaning or establish that all impressions of the design had the same physical history. Tate's catalogue documents them for its own sheet. ^[1]

Cain, gesture and the origins of the arts

Martin Butlin's Tate catalogue discusses a later tradition in which Lamech accidentally kills Cain. This offers one possible explanation for the corpse and for Lamech's reference to Cain's protection. It remains a tradition brought to the biblical passage, however. Genesis 4 does not narrate Cain's death, describe an accident or state that Lamech killed him. The picture's unnamed body cannot independently turn that later story into the scriptural account. ^[1][2]

The distinction affects the emotional reading. If the victim is Cain, the scene can bring the first murderer's history back upon his descendant. If the body remains unnamed, attention rests on the killing Lamech announces and the fear it produces in the household. Either approach must reckon with Blake's visibly agitated figure. His hands, eyes and bent head give the speech an emotional pressure that its short biblical form leaves unstaged. ^[1][2]

Butlin also reports Janet Warner's comparison between Lamech's hands at his forehead and a conventional gesture of indignation described by the eighteenth-century dancing master John Weaver. The comparison situates Blake's emphatic bodily language within the expressive vocabulary of pantomime. It helps explain how a pose can communicate forcefully before a viewer knows the story. It does not establish that Blake copied this figure from a particular performance or that indignation excludes grief, fear or remorse from our response. ^[1]

A different interpretation, attributed by Butlin to David Bindman, attends to Lamech's children. Music and metalworking enter the genealogy through Jubal and Tubalcain. Bindman proposes that the wives can represent the condition of the arts in a fallen world. This makes the family setting relevant to Blake's own concerns as an artist: cultural invention arises within a history already marked by murder and vengeance. ^[1][2]

That interpretation gains interest from the chapter's actual arrangement, which places the account of the children immediately before Lamech's speech. Yet the women hold no musical instruments or metalworking tools in the picture. Their visible embrace answers the immediate violence. The allegorical proposal adds a further level of meaning; it need not displace the embrace, the listening profile or the fear that Tate's display caption emphasises. ^[1][2]

Colour printed across the surface

The image's broad fields of colour began in printing, with ink and watercolour contributing to the finished sheet. Joseph Viscomi describes Blake's large colour prints as works made by painting a prepared matrix, transferring the colour to paper and clarifying the result by hand. In his reconstruction, Lamech belongs among the designs printed from prepared millboard. The process allows painterly masses and textures to enter the image before its final drawn details are strengthened. ^[3]

This helps us look at the sky and ground. Their mottled surfaces differ from the precise lines that describe toes, hair and folds. Large dark areas provide an atmosphere in which the figures emerge, while fine contours make a face or hand legible. Printing and subsequent work cooperate within the same picture. For the wider range of Blake's methods, the account of his prints provides a useful starting point. ^[1][3]

One observation is especially specific to this impression. In a note to his 2007 study of Blake's productions of 1795, Viscomi cites Noa Cahaner McManus and Joyce H. Townsend's finding that almost the entire Tate Lamech image was printed, with no areas reserved for watercolour finishing. Their comparison with Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah suggested a more developed use of the technique and a relatively late place within the series. This is a technical argument reported by Viscomi, not a conclusion reached by measuring the apparent darkness of a reproduction. ^[14]

The observation does not erase the ink and watercolour recorded in Tate's medium description. A broadly printed image could still receive work that clarified or strengthened what had transferred. Viscomi's surrounding discussion stresses that the design's form was already substantially present in the painted matrix. We should therefore see the printed surface as a major part of the finished pictorial invention, while allowing for the work that followed on paper. ^[1][14]

Two impressions and a later sale

An impression is the individual sheet produced from a design. Tate's example is catalogued as Butlin 297; the other Lamech discussed in the scholarship is Butlin 298, recorded in Robert N. Essick's collection. Their shared composition has separate material histories. Even the proposed order of printing has been described differently. ^[1][3]

Butlin's 1990 Tate catalogue identifies Essick's example as almost certainly the second pull. Viscomi's 2017 table reverses that order, listing Essick 298 first and Tate 297 second, with both printed in 1795. These are differing scholarly reconstructions. The sequence should remain attributed to the source proposing it; it cannot serve as an uncontested rule for explaining the Tate image's strength or degree of finish. ^[1][3]

The date of a sale raises a separate question. Tate's catalogue links its Lamech with Blake's account with Thomas Butts dated 3 March 1806 and an apparent delivery on 5 July 1805. Viscomi places it among four prints acquired by Butts that July. A print made in 1795 could remain available for years before passing to a buyer. The gap does not require us to move its initial printing to the date of delivery. ^[1][3]

The Tate impression bears Blake's monogram, the abbreviation identifying him as inventor, and the date 1795. Viscomi argues that Blake commonly signed these works on sale, reading the signatures of Butts's July group together. Under that interpretation, the date points back to the design's earlier production while the signature belongs to a later transaction. It is an argument about the way Blake marked particular works, not permission to assign an identical sequence of printing, finishing and signing to every large colour print. ^[1][3]

Tate's later ownership history carries the sheet through the Butts family to W. Graham Robertson, who acquired it in 1906 and presented it to the gallery in 1939. The journey helps explain how a work made for Blake's small market became available within a public collection. Its present museum identity combines the surviving surface with inscriptions, documentary accounts and successive cataloguing decisions. ^[1]

A family group left in distress

Butlin proposes that Lamech and Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah may have been conceived as companion works, pointing to their related format and treatment. He also acknowledges how difficult it is to establish a closer connection between their subjects. Both concern a family group with two women, but that resemblance does not supply a documented programme or a fixed order in which Blake intended the twelve designs to be read. ^[1]

Here, the family relationship is already enough to sustain the image. Lamech's speech travels towards two women who support each other while he seizes his own head. The dead man lies beyond their reach. Blake turns a terse biblical declaration into an encounter with the living consequences of killing. Its uncertainty keeps us looking: at the difference between the words and the pose, at the women's separate faces, and at the small space of mutual care they maintain beside the violence. ^[1][2]