Christ the Redeemer, Christ calls the afflicted to himself (Sketch)

Not an episode but an invitation

The recorded title runs: Christ the Redeemer, Christ calls the afflicted to himself. That is not a scene from the narrative. It is the words of Matthew's eleventh chapter — come unto me, all you that labour — turned into an image. Subjects of this kind stand outside the sequence of events on purpose: no hour, no place, no witnesses whose names can be given.

Where it sits relative to the cycle

Nowhere in it, and that is the point. A cycle that runs from Nativity to Ascension has a first panel and a last one. An address to the viewer has neither. Nineteenth-century religious painting used this register often, because a church decoration made for a modern congregation needed an image that spoke outward rather than one that reported an event.

The catalogue entry

The record names Albert Maignan, dates the work to 1877, and places it in the Petit Palais, Paris, France. The title itself ends with the word Sketch, so the entry declares the work preparatory rather than final; the record says nothing about what it was preparatory for, and this page does not guess. The measurements given are 45.6 x 37 cm, small, which is consistent with that declaration. The style is entered as Academicism and the artist as French. The measured palette reads as brown.