Christ in the Garden of Olives with the Sleeping Apostles

The Gospels tell how, on the night before he died, Jesus took Peter, James and John into the garden of Gethsemane and asked them to keep watch while he prayed. Each time he came back he found them asleep. Here the three sprawl across the foreground. Behind them Christ kneels, and an angel brings him a cup, the painters' way of showing his prayer that this cup might pass from him. Beyond the garden rises a walled city, Jerusalem.

The Louvre lists the panel under Bernard van Orley and also under his school, and it dates it no more closely than the 16th century. Who in the busy Brussels workshop did what is left open. The picture reached the museum by an unusual route. In 1976 Madame Pierre Deslandres gave it to the Louvre but kept the right to enjoy it for the rest of her life, and it stayed with her until her death in 1987. The panel came into the collection the following year.