The Capture of Christ, 1858
The Capture of Christ illustrates a dramatic scene from Matthew 26: 47-57. Two richly dressed Pharisees lead the procession of armed guards and Jesus Christ. The haloed Christ, bound at the wrist, is pulled forward toward an unjust judgment and crucifixion. To the left a remorseful Judas broods, clutching his bag of thirty silver coins for which he had betrayed the Savior. The walled city of Jerusalem is visible in the background as the first light of dawn appears.
Hofmann had been a student of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art where late Nazarene painters still promoted the revival of religious painting. While he painted The Capture of Christ he was living in Rome and was encouraged by the work of the old masters and great living artists like Peter Cornelius who championed idealised classical religious art. By the late 1850s Hofmann, now in his thirties, courageously pursued a major religious subject that expressed not only his own spiritual inclinations but the ideals of German national painting.
When he returned to Germany in 1858 to exhibit the work he was full of apprehension. In a letter to a friend, he considered the career implications of this new major painting.
The success which this painting will have on your exhibition is of the greatest importance to me, and will be influential for all my future activities. On it will depend if I will be able to start with fresh courage, on another, greater, more significant work, or if I will have to clip the wings of my ambition and work a year at portrait paintings during the best years of my life.
When it was exhibited in 1858 at Munich it attracted much positive attention. One critic praised its powerful psychological depiction of Judas’s guilt, so distinct from Christ’s “enduring nobility.” Indeed, Hofmann’s ability to evoke Christ’s serenity and inward deity against the psychological turmoil of his earthly companions soon became a key feature in the artist’s religious works. Because of its acclaimed reception, the painting was purchased by Darmstadt’s leading museum.
Having recently returned from Rome, this was just the encouragement that Hofmann needed to pursue more ambitious pieces. Nevertheless with a new young wife to support, Hofmann still felt obligated to earn an income through portraiture. Throughout the 1860s and 70s Hofmann presented a smattering of religious subjects, while portraits still reigned as the dominant genre in his oeuvre until the 1880s when Hofmann decisively turned toward religious painting.
After waves of secular modernist art sidelined religious traditionalist painting as old-fashioned, The Capture of Christ was nearly forgotten. Hidden away in museum storage for decades, this is a rare opportunity to see Hofmann’s first great success in the genre of religious painting.
by Angela Swanson Jones
The Capture of Christ illustrates a dramatic scene from Matthew 26: 47-57. Two richly dressed Pharisees lead the procession of armed guards and Jesus Christ. The haloed Christ, bound at the wrist, is pulled forward toward an unjust judgment and crucifixion. To the left a remorseful Judas broods, clutching his bag of thirty silver coins for which he had betrayed the Savior. The walled city of Jerusalem is visible in the background as the first light of dawn appears.
Hofmann had been a student of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art where late Nazarene painters still promoted the revival of religious painting. While he painted The Capture of Christ he was living in Rome and was encouraged by the work of the old masters and great living artists like Peter Cornelius who championed idealised classical religious art. By the late 1850s Hofmann, now in his thirties, courageously pursued a major religious subject that expressed not only his own spiritual inclinations but the ideals of German national painting.
When he returned to Germany in 1858 to exhibit the work he was full of apprehension. In a letter to a friend, he considered the career implications of this new major painting.
The success which this painting will have on your exhibition is of the greatest importance to me, and will be influential for all my future activities. On it will depend if I will be able to start with fresh courage, on another, greater, more significant work, or if I will have to clip the wings of my ambition and work a year at portrait paintings during the best years of my life.
When it was exhibited in 1858 at Munich it attracted much positive attention. One critic praised its powerful psychological depiction of Judas’s guilt, so distinct from Christ’s “enduring nobility.” Indeed, Hofmann’s ability to evoke Christ’s serenity and inward deity against the psychological turmoil of his earthly companions soon became a key feature in the artist’s religious works. Because of its acclaimed reception, the painting was purchased by Darmstadt’s leading museum.
Having recently returned from Rome, this was just the encouragement that Hofmann needed to pursue more ambitious pieces. Nevertheless with a new young wife to support, Hofmann still felt obligated to earn an income through portraiture. Throughout the 1860s and 70s Hofmann presented a smattering of religious subjects, while portraits still reigned as the dominant genre in his oeuvre until the 1880s when Hofmann decisively turned toward religious painting.
After waves of secular modernist art sidelined religious traditionalist painting as old-fashioned, The Capture of Christ was nearly forgotten. Hidden away in museum storage for decades, this is a rare opportunity to see Hofmann’s first great success in the genre of religious painting.
by Angela Swanson Jones