Le Christ sur la mer de Galilée

In his last ten years Delacroix kept returning to one scene from the Gospels, the storm on the Sea of Galilee, painting it six or more times in the early 1850s. The subject had come back into fashion under Napoleon III, when religious pictures found ready buyers among French Catholics. Delacroix strips it to essentials. A small open boat is flung sideways on heaving green-black water, the disciples straining at the oars in real fear, while Christ lies asleep in the stern, about to be woken and to still the wind. The paint is loose and fast, worked in short curling strokes that keep the whole sea in motion.