The Wise and Foolish Virgins

The story comes from the 25th chapter of Matthew. Ten young women wait through the night for a bridegroom, five of them have brought spare oil for their lamps and five have not, and the five whose lamps go out are shut out of the wedding. Bernard sets the two groups apart, lamps in hand, on a canvas 97 by 140 centimetres. He painted it in 1927, at 59, in a manner he had built up from the Italian painting he spent years studying, and the medieval sculptors who put these same ten women on cathedral porches would have recognised the subject at once. Painting was only part of that year for him. In 1927 he also published a poem of his own in 20 cantos, The Wandering Jew, cutting the 21 woodcuts that illustrate it himself, and began giving public lectures on art.