Baptism of Christ by Antoine Coypel

The Baptism of Christ by Antoine Coypel

At the edge of the Jordan

Christ does not stand in the river here. He kneels on a flat rock at the water's edge, one foot reaching down into the shallows, bare to the waist, with a deep blue cloth wrapped around his hips and legs. His arms are crossed over his chest, hands flat against it, and his head is bowed with the eyes lowered. It is a posture of submission rather than of display: he receives the water without looking up at it.

John the Baptist leans in from the right. He wears a rough garment of animal skin with a red-orange mantle over it, and he is barefoot on the bank. In his raised right hand he holds a scallop shell, tipped so that a thin stream of water falls onto Christ's head; his left hand is open and reaching forward. John is the one who looks up, past Christ and into the sky, as if he has already seen what is happening there.

The opened heavens

The upper half of the canvas belongs to that sky. Dark storm clouds roll in from both top corners, and between them the clouds part onto a blaze of gold. At the centre of the light, directly above Christ's head, is the white dove with its wings spread. Above the dove, among the clouds, appears an old man with white hair and a white beard, draped in pale violet: God the Father, one hand lifted with the palm outward, the other extended down toward the scene. Faint heads of cherubs crowd the golden glow behind him.

Together the three form a vertical line down the middle of the picture: the Father in the clouds, the Spirit as a dove, the Son at the river. This is the moment described in Matthew's Gospel (3:13–17), when, as Jesus came up from the water, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and a voice from heaven named him the beloved Son.

Angels and children

Coypel fills the space around the dove with winged children. Some tumble through the clouds at the upper right, one with a finger to its lips, others peering down at the river. One swoops down beside John's head, reaching toward the shell.

At the left, two angels have come down to the bank. An older one in green and violet drapery, with dark wings, holds up one end of a large white cloth; a smaller one in pink, with blue-grey wings, supports the other and turns its face up toward the light. They are holding the cloth ready, as attendants would, for when Christ comes out of the water.

The landscape

Behind the angels the river opens into a wide stretch of water with a small fall or run of rapids at the far left, and blue hills beneath a patch of clear sky. At the right, trees rise behind John. In the foreground the shallow water catches the light from above in a pale, bright reflection.

The painter and the picture

Antoine Coypel was born in Paris in 1661, the son of the painter Noël Coypel. As a boy he spent four years in Rome, where his father had been appointed director of the French Academy, and there he studied the Antique and Italian painters including Raphael, the Carracci, Titian, Veronese and Correggio. He was received into the Académie Royale in 1681, became first painter to the Duke of Orléans in 1685, directed the Academy from 1714, and was named painter to the king in 1716. Later large commissions included the Aeneas Gallery at the Palais-Royal and the ceiling of the royal chapel at Versailles. He died in 1722.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art dates The Baptism of Christ to about 1690, when Coypel was in his late twenties. It is oil on canvas, 136.2 by 97.6 centimetres, a little over a metre tall. According to the museum, it stayed in the painter's family and passed to his son Charles-Antoine Coypel, whose Paris sale in 1753 included it; it later belonged to the collector Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, was sold in Paris in 1770, and came through the London dealers P. & D. Colnaghi to LACMA, a gift of The Ahmanson Foundation in 1990 (accession M.90.154).

About this print

Made from the photograph of the painting that LACMA has released into the public domain, in the canvas's upright format.

Sources: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, collection record M.90.154 (collections.lacma.org/object/717) · Wikimedia Commons, File:The_Baptism_of_Christ_LACMA_M.90.154.jpg · Wikipedia, "Antoine Coypel"