"WHAT JESUS SAW FROM THE CROSS"  (Jacques Tissot)

 

 

    This painting Tissot is of a realistic but somewhat mysterious sort. The figure standing in strange relief; here prostrate women; there jeering Jews; at the side hard-visaged soldiers; in the distance a wandering, terrified multitude; standing out in the foreground the erstwhile stolid, but now awakened, centurion. The artist calls

it, “What Jesus Saw from the Cross,” yet there is no cross to be seen, and properly, for it is what was seen from the cross. Ah, that was a vantage point for viewing the world! Lifted up there, Jesus could see what men or angels had never seen before. Let us study the scene.

    All the world, aye, the universe, were gathered together, and circled about the cross. Men were there, women were there, Jews were there, Gentiles were there, disciples were there, despisers and haters of religion were there, angels were there, devils were there—God himself! Oh, what a scene; what a focal point in all times, and eternity too!

[Jacques Joseph Tissot (French: [tiso]; 15 October 1836 – 8 August 1902), Anglicized as James Tissot (/ˈtɪsoʊ/), was a French painter and illustrator. He was a successful painter of Paris society before moving to London in 1871. He became famous as a genre painter of fashionably dressed women shown in various scenes of everyday life. He also painted scenes and characters from the Bible.]