Christ on the Mount of Olives

Gethsemane, late

The episode is the prayer on the Mount of Olives, the night before the arrest: the request that the cup pass, the sleeping disciples, and in Luke's account an angel bringing strength. It is the first scene of the Passion and the last in which Christ is at liberty.

Where the record puts it

The catalogue dates this treatment to 1819 and gives the location as the Escuelas Pías de San Antón in Madrid — a religious foundation rather than a museum, which means the work is recorded where it was intended to function rather than where it was collected. Four works in this catalogue are attributed to Goya, and this is the only one of them whose location field names a foundation of that kind rather than a museum.

The rest of the entry

The catalogue names Francisco Goya as the painter. The dimensions are 47 by 35 centimetres, small and upright — far below the scale of the altarpiece treatments of the same subject here, and closer to a study or a private devotional panel, though the record does not say which and neither does this page. The style is entered as Romanticism and the artist as Spanish; the subject fields class the work as religious. The measured palette reads as ochre. No commission and no provenance are recorded.