Christ Showing A Little Child As The Emblem Of Heaven

A teaching episode, rarely painted

The title points to the passage in the eighteenth chapter of Matthew: the disciples ask who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and Christ sets a child among them and answers that unless they become as children they will not enter it. Luke and Mark give versions of the same exchange. It is a scene of instruction, not of miracle or Passion, and it appears far less often in painting than the healings or the road to Calvary.

Where it falls

In the middle of the ministry, among the teachings in Galilee, well before the journey to Jerusalem. It belongs with the other episodes in which children are the point — the blessing of the children is the closest neighbour — and it is one of the few moments where the disciples' own ambition is the thing being corrected.

The record

The catalogue names Benjamin West, dates the work to 1790, and gives the location only as a private collection. It measures 70 by 50.5 centimetres. The style is entered as Neoclassicism and the artist as American — one of only six American entries in a catalogue that files 131 works under Italian and 53 under Flemish. The subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown.