Christus verlässt das Prätorium

Gustave Doré was famous across Europe as an illustrator, and it galled him. He wanted to be taken seriously as a painter, and this enormous canvas, some six metres tall and nine across, was his answer, the picture he called the work of his life. It shows Christ walking down from Pilate's hall toward the waiting crowd. Doré began it in 1867 in Paris, and it took him five years, partly because history kept interrupting. During the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, and then the upheaval of the Commune, he rolled the huge canvas up and buried it for safety. Doré had been born in Strasbourg, and in 1988 the city's museum bought the painting and brought it back to his birthplace, where it hangs in a room built tall enough to take it.