Christ in the Praetorium

The year is 1849, and Delacroix, in his early fifties, is turning again and again to scenes from the Gospels. This one sets the moment inside the praetorium, the Roman governor's hall, where Christ stands bound before Pontius Pilate and the crowd that will decide his fate. It is not a large picture, a little under one metre wide, and Delacroix builds it in loose patches of colour and deep shadow rather than clean outline, so the eye finds the pale bound figure before it sorts out the soldiers pressing around him. He was working through these years in the shadow of the 1848 revolution, which had unseated yet another French government the year before.