Christus am Ölberg

Gauguin painted this in November 1889, in a small village on the coast of Brittany where he had gone to lick his wounds. That summer Paris had thrown its huge World's Fair, the one that raised the Eiffel Tower, and Gauguin and his circle had staged their own exhibition at a café on the fringe of it, hoping to be noticed. They mostly were not. So he cast himself as Christ praying alone in the garden the night before his arrest, giving the figure his own features and a shock of red hair. The place looks more like Brittany than Judea, purple ground and bent trees under a cold blue dusk. Off in the distance his companions are walking away, small and dim, the way the disciples slept while Christ kept watch.