Христос у Гетсиманському саду

Христос у Гетсиманському саду (Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane), dated 1888 and now in the Tretyakov Gallery, depicts the moment of Christ's prayer on the night of his arrest — the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. By 1888 Ge was deeply into the late Passion series that would culminate in the Golgotha and Crucifixion canvases of 1893–94. The Gethsemane subject — Christ alone, praying in darkness, asking that the cup pass from him — allowed Ge to explore the psychological truth of a man facing his own death with full knowledge, without recourse to divine impassivity. Tolstoy, who saw these works, recognised in them the rejection of the consoling God of official Orthodoxy and the embrace of a fully human, suffering Christ. The Tretyakov Gallery's holding places this among the most important works in the late religious series.

Oil on canvas, the night garden setting requires Ge to work with very limited light — perhaps moonlight, perhaps a distant lamp, perhaps no light at all. The nocturnal palette is reduced and dark, with the figure of Christ barely distinguishable from the surrounding darkness. This darkness is not atmospheric but existential — the light that has been present in conventional religious imagery is deliberately withdrawn. The handling is loose and gestural in the periphery, slightly more resolved at the figure's face.