Christ and his disciples entered the Garden of Gethsemane

The walk to the garden

The recorded title is unusual because it names an arrival rather than an event: Christ and his disciples entered the garden of Gethsemane. What normally gets painted is what happens once they are there — the prayer, the sleeping disciples, the cup — and what this title fixes is the moment before any of that. The narrative supplies it in half a verse, and a painter who takes that half verse as the subject is deliberately choosing the approach over the crisis.

Where it falls in the cycle

After the supper, before the arrest, on the night of the Thursday. Six titles in this catalogue name Gethsemane, and this is the one that stops earliest in the episode. Late nineteenth-century religious painting favoured that kind of displacement, treating the sacred narrative as a sequence of ordinary movements rather than of visions.

The record

The catalogue gives Nikolai Ge, dates the work to 1888, and places it in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. It measures 65.3 x 85 cm, horizontal and modest — nothing about the scale suggests a church picture. The style is entered as Realism and the artist as Russian; the subject fields class the work as religious with no figure classification. The measured palette is the plainest possible reading, neutral. The record carries no commission, exhibition or ownership history, and none is added here.