Title: The Sermon on the Mount Artist: Károly Ferenczy Medium: Oil on canvas Size: 135 x 203 cm Date: 1896 Location: National Gallery, Budapest. On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, eight maids a-milking...
The eight maids can be identified with the eight beatitudes, or blessings, taught by Jesus as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:3-10. Together, the Beatitudes present a new set of Christian ideals that focus on spirit love and humility and echo the highest ideals of the teachings of Jesus on mercy, spirituality, and compassion. He said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Medium: Watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper
Size: 24.4 x 16.4 cm
Date: c. 1890
Location: BrooklynMuseum, Brooklyn, New York.
The Gospel of Matthew records the early ministry of Jesus in a matter-of-fact style. Chapter 4:23-25 reports, “And Jesus was going about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the reign, and healing every disease, and every malady among the people, and his fame went forth to all Syria, and they brought to him all having ailments, pressed with manifold sicknesses and pains, and demoniacs, and lunatics, and paralytics, and he healed them. And there followed him many multitudes from Galilee, and Decapolis, and Jerusalem, and Judea, and beyond the Jordan.”
These events lead up to one the most widely read passages of Christian scripture, when Jesus, having seen the multitudes that followed him, went up the side of a mountain to teach. The Sermon of the Beatitudes is full of Gods’ love and wisdom, and ends with the declaration “when Jesus ended these words, the multitudes were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as having authority, and not as the scribes.” Tissot’s depiction of Jesus as he is about to begin his sermon is both realistically accurate, rendering a rocky formation a speaker could use to have his voice heard by thousands, and has a keen spiritual feel as Jesus almost appears to be aloft, as though he is floating above the gathering multitude, prefiguring his own Ascension.
James Jacques Joseph Tissot (October 15, 1836 – August 8, 1902) was a French painter. After the death of his longtime companion Kathleen Newton in 1882, Tissot spent some time in Palestine. In Paris in 1896 he débuted the series of 350 drawings of the life of Christ, and the following year found them on show in London. They were then published by the firm of Lemercier in Paris, who paid him 1,100,000 francs. The merits of Tissot's Bible illustrations lay in the care with which he studied the details of scenery rather than any religious sentimentality. He seemed to aim for accuracy, and, in his figures, for vivid realism, which was far removed from the conventional treatment of sacred types.
