Stop and Look – Christ leaving the Praetorium (1872)

In the eyes of the British at the end of the nineteenth century, the French artist Gustave Doré epitomised the best and greatest of French art. This colossal painting, Christ leaving the Praetorium (1872), is one of an ambitious series of canvases that the artist exhibited in London at a gallery of his own, the Doré Gallery, on Bond Street (on the site now occupied by Sotheby’s auctioneers). It was open for 24 years and some two and a half million people visited it.  

Despite the popularity of his very grand pictures, he became known in this country particularly for his searching depictions of the London poor: large, crowded and unhappy scenes professionally engraved on wood, as nearly all commercial illustrations were at that time. Among many Biblical subjects, he also illustrated Dante and Milton, as well as Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, not to mention Poe and Tennyson and many others.

In contrast to these book illustrations, though very much in their apocalyptic spirit, his visionary late-Romantic canvases summed up in suitably exaggerated style the more important developments, as they were perceived at the time, in the painting of the last hundred years. Doré conceived his subjects as scenes from grand opera — and Parisian grand opera at that. We are in the world of Meyerbeer and Gounod (with Wagner in the background): spectacular scale, no dramatic punches pulled, every emotion drained to the dregs. The seething crowds of onlookers in this colossal picture are an essential part of the Biblical story and stand in, as well, for the turbulent range of emotions that the events depicted arouse in the hearts of viewers of the canvas. 

The subject is of course well known. It’s from Matthew chapter 27; here are verses 27-32:

“Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers. And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews. And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head. 

And after that they had mocked him they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him. And as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name: him they compelled to bear his cross.”

Doré profits from the vivid detail of St Matthew’s story-telling, but he adds his own narrative emphasis.  In keeping with the operatic idiom, the principal character in the drama is presented as immaculate, an idealised figure with no sign of the humiliation and brutality of the mocking scene that has just preceded this. He is spotlit on a flight of steps in the centre of the pictorial stage, deliberately contrasted with the variegated humanity crowded around. 

The derivation of this huge picture from the great achievements of the High Renaissance is explicit. The classical architecture in the background comes from Raphael, and Raphael can also be credited with much of the human detail in the crowd: Doré has obviously been looking at the foreground throng in Raphael’s Transfiguration in the Vatican.  One could fill a book with analysis of everything going on in this tumult. Simon of Cyrene is struggling under the weight of the great wooden cross a few paces in front of its intended victim. It seems placed to trip Jesus up in his stately progress, undercutting the grandeur with clumsy, harsh reality.  

Astonishingly, many of Doré’s huge canvases exist in two or more versions: there’s a very slightly smaller, varied replica of Christ leaving the Praetorium in the museum at Nantes.

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.