Our Saviour after the Temptation (sketch)

George Hayter's sketch for Our Saviour after the Temptation from 1848 shows the British portrait and history painter working on a religious subject during the middle years of his long career as principal painter-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. Hayter had trained in Rome in the 1820s and developed his history painting ambitions alongside his more commercially lucrative court portraiture. Christ after the Temptation — the exhausted savior ministered to by angels following forty days in the desert — was a contemplative subject that suited the mood of Victorian religious painting, which tended toward intimate psychological engagement rather than the grand theatrical gestures of earlier history painting. Hayter was known primarily for his enormous group portraits of ceremonial occasions, and this religious sketch represents a more personal expression of his artistic ambitions.

The oil-on-canvas sketch demonstrates Hayter's fluid preparatory technique with broad brushwork establishing the figure's pose and the dramatic landscape setting. The loose handling and warm palette reveal the expressive energy underlying his more polished finished works.