Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Women

Delacroix painted this large canvas in 1836 and showed it at the Salon that year, after which the French state bought it and sent it to a church in Nantua, a small town in the Ain, where it has hung ever since. The subject is a quieter moment than the usual Saint Sebastian. Instead of the young man pierced with arrows at the stake, we are shown the aftermath. Irene, a Roman widow, has come with a companion to nurse him, and she bends to draw the arrows out of his body by torchlight. Delacroix was taken enough with the composition that he painted seven smaller versions of it over the next 20 years. The bare, cooling flesh of Sebastian is the brightest thing in an otherwise deep and shadowed scene.