with Hanover Gallery, London, where acquired by Eugene and Penelope Rosenberg, 27th November 1952
Exhibition History:
London, Hanover Gallery, F.E. McWilliam, October – November 1952, cat. no.12;
Belfast, Ulster Museum, F.E. McWilliam, 2 April – 10 May 1981, cat. no.19, with Arts Council of Ireland tour to Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork, and Orchard Gallery, Derry;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Where’s God Now? 18 July – 27 September 2015;
London, East Wing Galleries, Somerset House, Out There: Our Post-War British Art, 3 February – 10 April 2016
Literature:
The Tatler, 12th November 1958, p.339;
Roland Penrose, McWilliam, Alec Tiranti Ltd, London, 1964, pp.8-9, illustrated no.43;
Denise Ferran and Valerie Holman, The Sculpture of F.E. McWilliam, Lund Humphries in association with the Henry Moore Foundation, Farnham, 2012, cat. no.88, illustrated p.111 (another cast)
The present work is a smaller version of the maquette which McWilliam submitted for the International Competition to design a monument to honour the Unknown Political Prisoner in 1953. The two figures struggling with each other symbolised man’s eternal persecution of man, of which the political poisoner is but the contemporary symptom. His design was one of the final twelve alongside maquettes by Hepworth, Frink, Chadwick, Paolozzi and the winner, Reg Butler and was his first work to enter the Tate’s Collection. He chose the title Cain and Abel to differentiate his sculpture from other maquettes from the competition that were also acquired.
