Christ Leaving the Praetorium

The original painting, the most monumental of Doré's paintings, was created in the largest of his Parisian studios, a former gymnasium of 400 m2, located at 3 Rue Bayard, and rented since 1865. After its completion in April 1872, it was first exhibited at the Doré Gallery, in London, starting in May.^[2]

In 1873, the owners of his London gallery, James Fairless and George Lord Beeforth, commissioned him a replica. Not having obtained satisfaction, they reiterated their request two years later. Doré created a replica, of large but slightly smaller dimensions (482 by 722 cm), painted between 1876 and 1883.^[3] It is owned by the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts, which bought it in the United States, in 1984.

Doré informed Fairless and Beeforth, on February 24, 1882, by letter, that six replicas were in the making. Of this, a third extant version, kept at Bob Jones University in Greenville, is significantly smaller than the previous two (148 by 223 cm).^[4]

Doré was disappointed to be seen mostly as an illustrator by the French critics, who often disregarded his painting. However, his paintings were appreciated abroad, particularly in England, where he successfully exhibited in 1867. The following year, he accepted the proposal of two London publishers, the art dealers James Fairless and George Lord Beeforth, to open a gallery at 35 New Bond Street in London, entirely dedicated to the permanent display of his paintings: the Doré Gallery.

The illustrations of his monumental Bible, published on December 1, 1865, to take advantage of Christmas sales, in all the capitals of Europe, gave him a reputation as religious painter.^[5] He created several more or less spectacular religious paintings that were intended for the Doré Gallery, which included this monumental Christ Leaving the Praetorium. He started working on it in 1867, and it would take him five years to complete it. The work was frequently interrupted by the making of several illustration works, and mostly by the siege of Paris at the French-Prussian War, and then the insurrection of the Paris Commune, during which he rolled up and buried his canvas. He only resumed his work on the painting in the beginning of 1872 and finished it in April.^[6]

The painting was finally sent to London in May 1872. After Doré's death, in 1883, the painting was part of a long traveling exhibition of the Doré Gallery in the United States, starting in 1892. It began in Carnegie Hall, in New York City, and finished triumphantly in Chicago, in 1896. When the painting returned to London in 1898, after the death of the owners of the Doré Gallery, it was stored and forgotten.

Rediscovered in the 1960s, it was acquired by Oscar Kline, owner of the Central Picture Gallery in New York, before entering the collection of George Encil in 1984, who placed it on deposit in Vienna in the Votivkirche. In 1988, it was bought by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Strasbourg, thanks to the Regional Fund for the Acquisition of Museums, and finally returned to France. Since its restoration, this masterpiece by Gustave Doré is exhibited in a room to its measure, vast and very high, with some of his other paintings.

The episode depicted in this work is original: it took place between two episodes of the Passion of Christ, often represented in religious iconography, the Presentation of Jesus to the crowd by Pontius Pilate, who let them choose between Him and Barrabas, and the Carrying of the Cross. According to one of his first biographers, his friend William Blanchard Jerrold, the fact that this particular episode had never been represented previously in painting was evoked during a meal at George Grove in Sydenham in the company of the Rev. Frederick Harford, canon of Westminster Abbey, in 1867.^[7]

Doré immediately was set to work, and made numerous studies in black and white for the groups of figures and the head of Christ. He sometimes felt irritated at having to postpone it to work on his illustrations. When he traveled in London in the company of Blanchard Jerrold to prepare the illustrations for London: A Pilgrimage, the latter found him obsessed with his large painting, to the point of integrating certain London perspectives into it. This is how the view of the neoclassical St George's Church, in Hanover Square, with the statue of William Pitt the Younger, in the southern part of it, on a particularly gloomy morning, inspired him to create the colonnades of the temple on the right and the statue in the background at the center of the painting.^[8]

Originally, the painting was "bathed in light" according to Blanchard Jerrold. But Frederick Harford, during a visit to Doré in 1870, when the painting was practically finished, felt disappointed: for him, " the sky should have been overcast; this dreadful morning should not have been sunny", and the painter, understanding his criticism, begun to darken the top of the canvas, gradually bringing out "the awesome majesty of the Savior in the sadness of this sad morning". Shelved during the siege of Paris, the painting was not resumed and completed until after the end of the 1870 war. It was presented in Paris in April 1872, before leaving for London in May.^[9]