Christ in the Wilderness

Forty days in the wilderness

After the baptism, and before he calls a single disciple, Christ goes into the desert for forty days and is tempted. Matthew and Luke give the three temptations in dialogue; Mark reduces the whole episode to two verses. Because the text is thin, the subject stayed rare in painting for centuries and became more attractive in the nineteenth, when the interest shifted from the tempter to the solitude.

Where it falls

Between the Jordan and the first miracle — the narrow seam where the ministry has been authorised but has not begun. It is the only episode in the cycle with no second human figure required in it.

The record

The catalogue names Ivan Kramskoy, dates the work to 1872, and gives the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, one of six entries here in that collection. It measures 210 by 180 centimetres — an upright at well over life size, which is exhibition scale rather than devotional scale, and a size a nineteenth-century painter chose for a public rather than a church. The style is entered as Realism and the artist as Russian; the subject fields class the work as a landscape, a male figure and religious. The measured palette is recorded as neutral. No commission or exhibition history appears in the record.