Christ on the Sea of Galilee

The storm on the lake

The three synoptic gospels tell it the same way: the disciples cross the Sea of Galilee by boat, a squall rises, Christ is asleep in the stern, and he is woken and stills the wind and the water. It is one of the few episodes in the cycle in which Christ is not the acting figure for most of the scene, and painters used that — the composition is generally a boat, a wave, and a group of alarmed men around a still one.

Where it falls in the cycle

Mid-ministry, among the miracles in Galilee, well before the journey to Jerusalem. It is a nature miracle rather than a healing, and it sits with the walking on the water and the miraculous draught of fishes as one of the lake episodes.

The record

The catalogue gives Eugene Delacroix, 1854, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. At 59.8 by 73.3 centimetres it is a small horizontal canvas. The style is entered as Romanticism, the artist as French, and the period as the nineteenth century — the latest date among the works gathered here. The subject fields file the work under seascape, boats and ships, nautical, and religion, which is how a catalogue describes a gospel episode that is also a picture of weather. The measured palette reads as green and yellow.