Landscape with the Calling of Saint Peter

Philippe de Champaigne is remembered above all for severe, quiet portraits, the faces of the Jansenists of Port-Royal, a strict Catholic community near Paris he was close to. So a wide landscape like this one comes as a surprise. It shows the Gospel moment when Christ calls the fishermen Peter and Andrew from their boats to follow him, set on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Champaigne pushes the small figures into a broad sweep of water, boats and sky. For him the sacred story and the calm, ordered nature belong together, the work of a painter who spent his life among people who wanted faith stripped of display. It is now in the Uffizi.