Christ and Sinner by Henryk Siemiradzki

Christ and Sinner by Henryk Siemiradzki (1873)

Two groups on a sunlit road

The canvas is very wide, twice as long as it is high, and it divides into two halves. On the left, a road comes towards us out of a bright hilly distance, and along it walks a long column of men in plain white and brown robes, some with staffs. At their head, a little in front of the others, is Christ, in a simple white garment, standing still and looking across to the right.

On the right is a house with a columned porch and an awning, with stone steps and walls in strong sunlight. It is crowded with a party: women in bright silks, men leaning on the parapet or waving from the steps, a musician with a stringed instrument reclining at the lower right, a basket of flowers at the edge. Between the two halves, at the centre, rises an ancient olive tree with a huge twisted trunk, its branches spreading over the wall and throwing broken shade across the ground.

The courtesan

At the foot of the steps, in front of her companions, sits a young woman in a gown of pale lilac and cream silk, with jewels at her neck and wrists. She has turned towards Christ and gone still. On the ground at her feet lies a fallen cup, its wine spilt in the dust.

This is the moment the painting is about. English Wikipedia describes it as a confrontation of gazes: the courtesan, surrounded by her entertainers, meets Christ's eyes and lets her wine goblet fall. Nobody seizes her or drags her before him; the change happens across the open ground between the two groups.

A poem behind the picture

This is not the usual way of painting the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery, with accusers and stones. English Wikipedia describes the subject as that story from John's Gospel reimagined through The Sinner, a poem by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy written in the late 1850s. The State Russian Museum, which owns the painting, describes the poem as the story of a beautiful courtesan's sudden spiritual rebirth on meeting Christ; the painting shows the instant that rebirth begins. The Russian Museum's own title for it is simply The Sinner.

The contrast is carried by colour and light as much as by the figures. Christ's side of the picture is pale and quiet, his followers dressed in plain cloth. The sinner's side is full of colour, silk, flowers and music, and she sits at its front edge, closest to him.

Painted in Rome

Siemiradzki (1843–1902) completed the canvas in Rome, in his studio on the Via Margutta, in February 1873. According to the Russian Museum, he painted it on a commission from the president of the Academy of Arts. It was shown at the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in March 1873 and then sent to the World's Fair in Vienna the same year, where it won a medal "For Art", Siemiradzki's first international award. The Academy gave him the title of Academician for it.

The picture was bought by the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich, the future Alexander III, for 10,000 roubles. It entered the Russian Museum in 1897 from the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, and it was restored in 2014. It is oil on canvas, 250 by 499 centimetres (inventory Zh-5674). Preparatory studies survive in Polish museums, and smaller oil versions have been identified in Pskov and Zurich.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole canvas in its long format, which keeps both halves of the composition and the open ground between them.

Sources: State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Ж-5674 (Virtual Russian Museum, rusmuseumvrm.ru) · Wikimedia Commons, File:Semiradsky_Christ_and_Sinner.jpg · Wikipedia, "Christ and Sinner"