The Descent from the Cross

Jouvenet painted this for the high altar of the church of the Capuchin nuns on the place Louis-le-Grand, today's place Vendôme in Paris, and signed it in 1697. It did not fare well there, and the paint soon began to suffer. In 1756 the Royal Academy of Painting asked to take the picture into its own care, Louis XV agreed, and the nuns gave up their altarpiece. To make up for the loss, the king ordered a copy for them from Jean Restout, a senior member of the Academy and Jouvenet's own nephew.

The Louvre calls this Jouvenet's most celebrated composition, copied countless times. It looks back to the great Descent from the Cross that Rubens painted for Antwerp Cathedral. Servants on ladders help Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus lower the body of Christ, the Virgin, John, Mary Magdalene and the other women look on, and two men spread the shroud on the ground ready to receive him.

Seized at the Revolution, the canvas went on show at the Louvre in 1796. In the early 1830s the American painter Samuel Morse, later famous for the telegraph, included it among the masterpieces packed into his view of the museum's Salon Carré.