Mary Magdalene in the House of the Pharisee

In Luke's Gospel, a woman known as a sinner weeps at Christ's feet during a dinner at the house of Simon the Pharisee, while the host silently judges her. Béraud moved the scene into a Paris dining room of 1891 and filled it with faces his public knew. The museum identifies the Pharisee as Ernest Renan, the scholar whose Life of Jesus had caused an uproar in 1863 by presenting Jesus as a purely human figure.

The woman in white stretched across the floor was modelled by Liane de Pougy, later one of the most famous courtesans of her day, and Christ, the only figure with a halo, by the journalist Albert Duc-Quercy. After the Salon of 1891 the picture went on show again at the World's Fair of 1900, when it belonged to Sir Campbell Clarke, the Daily Telegraph's correspondent in Paris.