The Resurrection of Lazarus

Jean Jouvenet was the foremost religious painter in France at the turn of the eighteenth century, and The Resurrection of Lazarus, painted in 1706, stands among his most celebrated achievements. The work belongs to a set of four monumental Gospel paintings — with The Miraculous Draught, The Descent from the Cross, and The Last Supper — commissioned for the Capuchins in the Rue Saint-Honoré and subsequently acquired by the Louvre. Jouvenet brought to these canvases an intensity of dramatic staging that drew on Rubens and Caravaggio while remaining firmly within the French classical tradition. Lazarus was a natural centrepiece for such a cycle: the miracle demanded a full range of figures — the grieving sisters, the astonished crowd, the newly living Lazarus — organised around Christ's commanding gesture. Jouvenet suffered a stroke in 1713 that paralysed his right hand; he subsequently learned to paint with his left, and some late works show the remarkable adaptive skill this required. The Louvre set remains the summit of his output and a landmark of French Baroque religious painting.

Oil on canvas of monumental scale, designed for viewing from below in a chapel setting. Jouvenet structures the composition on a strong vertical axis from Lazarus emerging upward toward Christ's raised arm, with the crowd fanning out laterally to fill the picture plane. His palette in the 1706 series is rich and warm, with deep crimsons and ochres set against cooler passages of shadow. Brushwork is energetic and assured, characteristic of his Rouennais training under Jean Restout the Elder.