The Raising of Lazarus

This is one of Delacroix's smaller religious pictures, about 60 centimetres tall, painted in 1850. It takes the moment from John's Gospel when Christ stands at the mouth of a tomb and calls Lazarus, four days dead, back into the light. Delacroix gives the scene almost none of the grandeur a large altarpiece would ask for. The figures gather in a dim, earthy space, the risen man still half wrapped in his grave cloths as the onlookers draw back. The paint is thin and rapid in places, worked for the flicker of light on cloth and skin more than for polished detail. He came back to Gospel subjects like this one repeatedly in his final years, most of them on just this quiet, easel-sized scale.