This reflected Watts's belief that wealth was taking the place of religion in modern society, and that this worship of riches was leading to social deterioration.

[1] Meanwhile, his father's strict evangelical Christianity led to Watts developing a deep knowledge of the Bible but a strong dislike of organised religion.

[9] From 1870 onwards he became widely renowned as a painter of allegorical and mythical subjects;[5] by this time, he was one of the most highly regarded artists in the world.

[11] Mammon originally meant wealth in Aramaic, but from the early days of the Christian Church the name was occasionally used to represent the personification of greed.

[12][13] Mammon was one of a series Watts painted at around this time on the theme of the corruption brought about by wealth, including The Wife of Plutus (1880s), Sic Transit (1880–1882) and For he had Great Possessions (1894).

[15] His headdress resembles donkey's ears, an allusion to Thomas Carlyle's description of "serious, most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared" in Past and Present.

[18][19] Although rarely exhibited outside the Tate Gallery, cheap photographic reproductions of Mammon made by Frederick Hollyer circulated widely, making it one of Watts's better-known paintings.

Forsyth considered Mammon a companion to Watts's 1885 Hope, arguing that both depicted false gods and the perils awaiting those who attempted to follow them in the absence of faith.

[20] By 1904 the image was well-enough known that the Daily Express reproduced the head of Mammon alongside that of John D. Rockefeller, a person of whom the newspaper greatly disapproved,[C] implicitly inviting readers to draw comparisons.