Saint Paul preaching at Ephesus

Le Sueur painted this monumental scene for the church of Saint-Gervais in Paris around 1649, depicting Saint Paul's famous sermon at Ephesus from the Acts of the Apostles, when his preaching caused Ephesian converts to burn their books of magic publicly. The work is one of his most ambitious public commissions, designed to function as an altarpiece-scale composition with the narrative clarity needed to communicate biblical history to a congregation. The burning of the books — described in Acts 19:19 as an act of collective conversion worth fifty thousand pieces of silver — gave Le Sueur an opportunity to combine architectural grandeur, dramatic fire effects, and a crowd scene requiring the kind of varied figure composition he had largely avoided in the more intimate Charterhouse series. His approach shows the influence of Poussin's large historical compositions, particularly in the organisation of crowd figures into rhythmically varied groups that collectively convey a shared emotional response. The painting is now in the National Gallery, London, where it stands as a major example of the French classical tradition in monumental religious painting at its mid-century height, demonstrating that French art could equal Italian ambition in large-scale sacred narrative.

Le Sueur organises the large canvas around a central architectural void — a colonnade or public space — that separates Paul's preaching group from the crowd's responsive burning. The two zones are visually and emotionally distinct: Paul's group is ordered and vertical; the crowd's activity is dynamic and lateral. The fire at the painting's lower register provides both literal and metaphorical illumination, its warm orange glow contrasting with the cooler light falling on Paul above.