The Miracle of the Gaderene Swine

The Miracle of the Gadarene Swine, exhibited in 1883 and now in the Tate, was one of Rivière's most ambitious biblical subjects. The episode from the Gospels — in which Jesus casts demons into a herd of swine that then rush down a hillside and drown — gave Rivière the opportunity to combine his signature animal subjects with a monumental narrative scene. The depiction of panicked, stampeding animals demanded the anatomical knowledge he had spent years accumulating at the Zoological Gardens and on country visits. Victorian biblical painting was entering its final flourishing in the 1880s before Impressionist and Symbolist currents displaced it, and Rivière's version is notable for the physical rather than symbolic rendering of the event. The swine are painted as real animals in physical panic rather than emblematic vessels of evil.

The composition exploits diagonal movement — the rush of the herd creates a strong perspectival thrust from upper left toward the foreground. Rivière varies his brushwork between the tightly rendered individual animals in the foreground and the more summary handling of the distant herd, creating a convincing sense of mass and momentum. A high horizon line compresses the scene dramatically.