The Agony in the Garden

In 1824 the city of Paris handed Eugène Delacroix his first official commission, for the left transept of the Jesuit church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis. He was still in his twenties and better known for shipwrecks and a massacre than for altarpieces. What he delivered in 1827 was this: Christ kneeling in the garden at night, wrapped in white and coral, turning away from three angels who lean in to comfort him. The Agony in the Garden was an old subject the great masters had mostly left alone. It caught on in France in exactly these years, when people were drawn to Christ at his most human and most alone, and a fashionable melancholy hung over the young. The canvas still stands where it was meant to go, in the transept, more than three metres tall.