Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery

The episode in 1917

The subject is the same passage from the eighth chapter of John that fifteenth- and seventeenth-century painters had used: the woman brought for judgement, the law invoked, the answer that scatters the accusers. What changes is the date. The record gives 1917, which places the work in the middle of the First World War and roughly four centuries after the earliest treatments of the subject in this catalogue.

Its place in the cycle, and in the century

Within the narrative it belongs to the Jerusalem teaching, before the Passion. Within this catalogue it sits near the far end of a range of dated entries that runs from 1424 to 1945: religious episode painting did not stop at the end of the Baroque, and this entry is one of the pieces of evidence for that.

The record

The catalogue names Max Beckmann and gives the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri as the location. No dimensions are entered, so nothing about scale is claimed here. The style is entered as Expressionism and the artist as German; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as ochre. The record carries no note on how the painting reached St. Louis.