The Miraculous Draught

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes belongs to Jouvenet's celebrated series of four monumental Gospel paintings completed in 1706 for the Capuchin church in Paris, alongside The Resurrection of Lazarus, The Descent from the Cross, and The Last Supper. These four canvases, now in the Louvre, are widely considered the summit of French Baroque religious painting. The Miraculous Draught depicts the episode in Luke 5 where Christ instructs the disciples to cast their nets into the sea despite a fruitless night's fishing — resulting in a catch so vast the boats begin to sink. Jouvenet, who had worked on marine subjects and genre scenes earlier in his career, brought unusual specificity to the nautical setting: rigging, nets straining under weight, the churning water of the Sea of Galilee. The episode was also read allegorically as a prefiguration of the Church's gathering of souls, lending theological depth to the spectacular visual spectacle. The scale of the canvas and the intensity of physical labour depicted give it a vitality rare in French religious painting of this period.

Oil on canvas of monumental dimensions. Jouvenet deploys an unusually horizontal composition to accommodate the broad seascape and multiple boat groupings. His colour in the 1706 series is rich and warm, with the silver-grey of the fish and rigging providing luminous foils to the deeper tones of human figures. The physical exertion of hauling nets is rendered with anatomical confidence informed by academic study of the figure in action.