Henri Camille Danger

Private Collection, Germany, since the 1970s;

Anonymous sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 20 October 2016, lot 1237.

Paris, Salon, 1893, no. 478.

Exhibited at the 1893 Salon, this painting dated 1892 had been the subject of an oil sketch a few years earlier (49 x 67.5 cm, Dorotheum sale, Vienna, 25 April 2018, lot 1146). Much smaller than the final painting, its composition was already virtually finished. It shows the figure of Christ standing in open land covered with lifeless corpses, while in the distance the smoke from a burning town rises into the sky. Christ’s demeanour perfectly illustrates the despair of religion in the face of mortal sins committed by humans, breaking St John’s commandment to ‘Love one another’ (John 15:17).

A pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Danger trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts before receiving the Grand Prix de Rome in 1887. He then travelled to Rome where he pursued his studies at the Académie de France until 1891. It was when he returned to France that Danger painted the present work, which was exhibited at the Salon the following year, largely inspired by the sketch he had made in 1889 while in Rome.