The Raising of Lazarus

religious

The huge Raising of Lazarus, one of four vast canvases painted by Jouvenet early in the eighteenth century for the church of Saint-Martin-des-Champs in Paris, is a tour-de-force of hes realistic vein combined with the elevated and idealized. Here the figure of Christ is somewhat over-bland and insufficiently assertive amid the agitated crowd gathered around the looming rocks of the tomb, but Mary, the sister of Lazarus, takes on the role of heroine, distressed yet decorous, and very consciously posed, in garments of gleaming white, gold, and green, to hold the centre of the stage. She is the embodiment of French academic classicism and could serve in comparable guise in many other pictures of the period.

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About the Artist

Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet

1644 – 1717

French painter, the outstanding member of a family of artists from Rouen. He went to Paris in 1661 and joined the studio of Lebrun. His early works, including decorations for the Salon de Mars at Versailles, were closely imitative of the style of Lebrun and Eustache Le Sueur (St Bruno in Prayer, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). He was the most distinguished of the group of artists who collaborated with La Fosse in the decorations at Trianon and Les Invalides, but he is now best remembered as the leading French religious painter of his generation, carrying out numerous major commissions for churches in Paris and elsewhere. His later work was marked both by Baroque emotionalism and by a realistic treatment of details foreign to the principles encouraged by the Academy. It is recorded, for example, that before painting his Miraculous Draught of Fishes he studied fishing scenes on the spot at Dieppe.

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