About this work
The eye lands immediately on the impossible: pale, spectral figures moving through the cobblestoned streets of ancient Jerusalem, cutting through solid crowds of the living. During the Crucifixion, various portentous events happened throughout Jerusalem, including the appearance of the dead in the Temple, described in Matthew 27:52–53 — and it is this extraordinary moment that Tissot commits to paint. He renders the risen dead as spectral forms, flying through Jerusalem and the Temple precinct, scattering the living, who fear that contact with the dead will defile them.
The work is executed with deft precision in opaque watercolor (gouache), offering a Victorian Academic style of slightly brushy, near-photographic realism — which makes the supernatural intrusions all the more unsettling against its documentary-feeling architecture and costuming.
This illustration was produced as part of Tissot's monumental *Life of Christ* series, dated c. 1886–94.
The origin of the series was Tissot's transformative religious experience in the Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice in 1885, which caused him to abandon his life as a successful society painter and travel to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in 1886–87, and again in 1889.
He traveled to the Middle East to make studies of its landscapes and cultures, which would come to distinguish his series from contemporary biblical art through its "considerable archaeological exactitude" in striving for accuracy rather than religious emotion. The result was a body of work unlike anything that had preceded it: a monumental series of 350 watercolors combining fantastic imagery with minute archaeological observation and vivid realism.
First presented in Paris in 1894, the watercolors were received with great enthusiasm; in 1900, at the suggestion of John Singer Sargent, the Brooklyn Museum acquired the complete series, with purchase funds raised primarily by public subscription.
On a wall, this image rewards stillness. Its small original scale — even the best modern reproductions do not do justice to the spellbinding quality of these miniature paintings — means that as a fine art print it gains new presence, inviting close reading of every cobblestone, every terrified face. It suits spaces where quiet contemplation is welcome: a study lined with books, a hallway lit with warm ambient light, a reading room where the strange and the sacred coexist. The viewer it calls to is someone drawn to history and mystery in equal measure — to art that refuses to separate the documentary from the visionary. There is nothing sentimental here; Tissot's ghost-figures carry the cold shock of something genuinely believed, painted by a man who had walked those very streets.
