Abraham and Isaac

This is a small picture, about 21 by 30 centimetres, painted on a wooden panel in 1817. That is the year the National Gallery gives for Olivier joining the Brotherhood of Saint Luke, German painters who wanted to bring back the religious art of the late Middle Ages. It tells the story from Genesis in which God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son. Isaac goes ahead up the path with the bundle of firewood for the altar on his back, and his father follows with a lit torch and a knife. The figures are drawn with hard, precise outlines, a deliberately old-fashioned manner that recalls early German woodcuts. Behind them the landscape is worked with great care. It is loosely based on drawings Olivier made around Salzburg in 1815, built up the way Italian Renaissance painters built their backgrounds. The panel was sold at auction in Munich in 1991 and given to the Gallery the following year by Bruno Meissner.