Medium/size: pen & black ink, pencil, watercolor and bodycolor (gouache), heightened with gold, on paper; ~60 × 88 cm. Signed “G. Janny – Wien/1918”; verso inscribed with the moral: “Das Gute & das Böse” (“Good & Evil”). Provenance includes Sotheby’s London, 24 Nov 1988, lot 708.

Artist background: Austrian painter and stage designer trained/worked in the famed Brioschi–Kautsky studios; he moved between Alpine landscapes and fantastical scenes in the orbit of Böcklin/Doré.

The scene, decoded

Janny opposes two regimes of power:

• Spiritual/transformative: the haloed figure that rises (literally) out of water—light, verticals, translucency.
• Coercive/brute: the slumped dragon and its brood of snakes—weight, horizontals, opacity.

Water = threshold (baptism, rebirth, access point). Cave = chthonic interior (the unconscious, the underworld). The beam crosses the pool, projecting an oblique cross that visually “pins” the dragon—symbolic subjugation without gore. Call it victory by illumination, not decapitation. (The verso title makes the ethical framing explicit.)

Composition & stagecraft (where his theater chops show)

• Blocking and diagonals: A primary diagonal runs from the upper-left light source to the dragon’s mass at lower right; the reflection in the pool creates a counter-diagonal. These two lines make a tilted cross that stabilizes the whole scene while dramatizing conflict.
• Lighting design: It’s a spotlight, not generic moonlight. The beam has a crisp falloff and a controlled “pool” (pun intended) that isolates the protagonist—the exact grammar of stage illumination Janny knew from the opera house.
• Texture rhythm: slick water → smooth robe → scaly hide → gritty ground. That tactile progression turns ethics into something you can feel.

Color, material, and that gleam

Cool blue–green tonality hushes the space so the gold heightening can do its job: the nimbus and beam literally catch ambient light in the room. In person, gold leaf/paint doesn’t just depict glow; it is glow—micro-reflective. That’s why reproductions often look flatter than the real thing. (The use of gold is documented in the auction description.)

Context: Vienna, 1918

Painted as the Habsburg world collapses (armistice, republic declared in November), the piece reads as a farewell to power defined by mass and might. It doesn’t name an empire; it dissolves one, alchemizing dragon-power into a dead weight that light can cross with ease. Janny the scenographer stages not a battle, but a transition of authority—from domination to illumination. (Biographical sources confirm his scenography roots; the date and Vienna inscription anchor the timing.)

A smart compare: The Dragon’s Cave (1917)

A year earlier Janny paints The Dragon’s Cave (listed among his works). There, the reptile is architecture; here, it’s spent force. The move from sublime monster-as-landscape to post-heroic aftermath suggests a wartime shift: spectacle → reckoning.

Ways to read it (curator’s cheat sheet)

1. Theological: a deus ex machina that purifies rather than slays; water as baptism, dragon as Evil subdued.
2. Psychological: the conscious (beam) entering the unconscious (cave) to integrate shadow-drives (dragon/snakes).
3. Political-historical: painted in Vienna 1918; a visual sermon that legitimacy comes from light (clarity, ethics), not mass (coercion).

Why it works (and avoids kitsch)

• He uses old symbols (angel/dragon) with modern theater grammar (hard spot, blocking, set-like cave).
• The tactile dialectic—wet vs. scaly—grounds lofty allegory in bodies and surfaces.
• The gold is not a gimmick; it’s an optical device that recruits the viewer’s space into the painting.

Display & conservation notes (for collectors/galleries)

• Lighting: angled, not head-on; let the gold catch light without blowing highlights. 2700–3000K works well with the cool palette to keep the gold warm.
• Glazing: museum glass to control reflections so the painted “glow” stays legible.
• Label copy (120 words)—ready to use: In 1918 Vienna, as an empire dissolved, Georg Janny—painter and stage designer—composed this theater of moral forces. A haloed figure rises from a pool, its radiance crossing a cave to touch a felled dragon. The beam and its reflection form a tilted cross that pins brute power in place, while snakes curl across the ashen ground. Executed in ink, watercolor, gouache, and gold, the image leverages stage lighting’s logic: a hard spotlight isolates a protagonist; the set recedes to shadow. Janny’s allegory isn’t about conquest; it’s about replacement—coercion yielding to illumination. Signed and dated in Vienna, the work registers a historical pivot and a timeless one: authority grounded in light rather than mass.

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Sources:

• Christie’s lot page — An Allegory of Power
• Wikimedia Commons — An Allegory of Power image entry
• Wikipedia — Georg Janny (biography)
• Chris Beetles Gallery — artist bio
• AskART — Georg Janny
• Wikimedia Commons — The Dragon’s Cave (1917) image entry
• MutualArt — An Allegory of Power (listing)
• Artvee — An Allegory of Power
• Wikimedia Commons category — 20th-century paintings of dragons
• Eclectic Light — article on Brioschi/Kautsky scene-painting tradition

Visual Composition

The illustration captures a liminal moment: the transition between day and night. The title itself, “Now Was the Day Departing,” signals twilight, a time traditionally associated with endings, reflection, and uncertainty. Doré emphasizes this through dramatic contrasts of light and shadow: the glowing horizon dissolves into encroaching darkness, while tall, barren trees or looming natural forms frame the scene and amplify its somber tone.

Doré’s line work is meticulous and rhythmic, leading the viewer’s eye across the page. The use of negative space — a clearing sky or fading light — feels almost divine in its intensity, surrounded by intricate detail in the foreground. This juxtaposition of clarity and density mirrors the thematic contrast of revelation and obscurity.

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Atmosphere and Emotion

The mood is melancholic, even solemn. Twilight in Doré’s hands is not soft or romantic but heavy, filled with spiritual weight. It evokes transience, mortality, and the passage of time. The scene suggests that what departs is not only daylight but also hope, security, and the known world, leaving the viewer suspended in uncertainty.

Doré frequently infused his works with a sense of the sublime — nature and time overwhelming human presence. If figures are included in this illustration, they are dwarfed by their environment, reinforcing the insignificance of humanity before cosmic cycles.

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Literary and Symbolic Resonance

The phrase “Now was the day departing” is rooted in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto II). Doré illustrated this epic extensively in the 19th century. In that passage, Dante marks the moment when the sun sets and shadows lengthen — a metaphor for his descent into the underworld, both literally and spiritually.

In this context, Doré’s image becomes a visualization of transition: from safety to peril, from the earthly realm to the metaphysical unknown. The encroaching darkness symbolizes both death and initiation, while the receding light recalls divine grace just out of reach.

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Artistic Significance

• Sublimity: Doré transforms a natural event (sunset) into a stage for cosmic drama.
• Universality: The image resonates beyond its Dantean roots — twilight is a universal metaphor for endings, mortality, and liminality.
• Style: Characterized by Doré’s signature engraving style — dense, intricate, and almost cinematic in its contrasts — the piece is a hallmark of 19th-century Romantic imagination.

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Technical Details and Context

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• Title: Jesus Ministered to by Angels / Jésus assisté par les anges
• Artist: James Jacques Joseph Tissot (known as James Tissot)
• Date: between 1886–1894
• Medium: opaque watercolor (gouache) over graphite on gray paper
• Dimensions: 17 × 24.8 cm (6 11/16 × 9 3/4 in.)
• Location: Brooklyn Museum, New York – acquired through public subscription in 1900

Description and Interpretation

The work is part of the monumental series The Life of Christ (La Vie de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ), a colossal visual project of about 350 watercolors, created after a religious vision the artist had in 1885. Tissot traveled to the Middle East (1886, 1889, 1896) to study scenery, costumes, and landscapes, aiming to give historical accuracy and biblical authenticity.

In Jesus Ministered to by Angels, Tissot depicts Jesus in a moment of vulnerability — collapsed, perhaps, after the forty days in the desert, but surrounded and supported by angels. The atmosphere is mystical, almost eerie: light radiates from the angels’ halos, contrasting with the surrounding darkness, which emphasizes both isolation and divine support.

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Artistic and Theological Significance

Symbolism & Mysticism: The painting is often placed in the Symbolist style, since it emphasizes inner religious experience rather than literal representation.
Reception: The public was fascinated by the clean, authentic Oriental realism, but critics of the time were divided — some admired his documentation, while others found it too theatrical, even “over-explained.”

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Visual Analysis

1. Light and Shadow Contrast
Jesus, clothed in a radiant white garment, sits at the center of the composition in a soft, warm light. The angels, by contrast, are rendered in cold, dark gray tones — almost corpse-like — evoking mystery and otherworldliness. This contrast highlights both Jesus’s vulnerable state and the supernatural intervention breaking through the darkness.

2. Posture and Gesture
Jesus lies stretched out, slightly slack, as if just emerging from an extreme trial. The angels’ hands reach toward him, but unlike many traditional depictions, they are not necessarily tender. Instead, they seem determined, austere, even pressing. Their “service” is suggested, but it’s a paradoxical service: dignified, ritualistic, full of authority.

3. Mystical, Hallucinatory Atmosphere
The Brooklyn Museum notes that Tissot’s style oscillates between rigorous naturalism and a “decidedly mystical or hallucinatory” aesthetic, close (in intent) to William Blake. Jesus appears exhausted yet almost ethereal, stretched between two worlds.

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Historical Context and Artistic Project

The Life of Christ Project: Tissot devoted his later years to this vast watercolor cycle, 350 works in total, illustrating biblical scenes with archaeological attention to costumes, landscapes, and people. He traveled through the Middle East to study the terrain “on site.”
This work belongs to that cycle, most likely intended as the scene after the temptation in the desert, when “the angels ministered unto him” (Mark 1:13; cf. Matthew 4:11, Luke 4:14). Tissot depicts not just the event but the inner state — exhaustion, divine indulgence, absolute service.

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Theological and Symbolic Interpretation

1. Human Vulnerability + Divine Support
Jesus, both God and man, appears weakened. This is a moment where his humanity — fatigue, suffering — is partially exposed. The angels come to serve him, to bring comfort. It’s a clear image of the idea that even the Son, in the limits of the body, received support — and more so, from heavenly beings.

2. Inner Darkness vs. Divine Light
The angels, painted in cold, shadowy grays, may represent aspects of the spiritual world that are not the comforting, luminous angels of tradition. Here, support is austere, solemn, mysterious, almost heavy with introspection. The light shining on Jesus is real, clear, but not festive. The focus is on sacred support, not triumphalism.

3. Re-activating the Scriptural Episode
The biblical text simply says: “the angels came and ministered to him.” It doesn’t specify how, only that they acted. Tissot takes artistic freedom to imagine them as shadowy-luminous presences, emerging not from outside but from the depth of spiritual reality. This is service, but it reminds us that religion is not always comforting.

4. Breathing Between Realism and Vision
Tissot fuses ethnographic realism (archaic costumes, authentic Middle Eastern scenery) with presences that feel fantastical. It’s a contrast between what is seen and tangible (realism) and what is unseen yet palpable (vision, the supernatural).

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Conclusion

Tissot’s work does not aim to be a pretty “religious illustration” — it is a militant visual reconstruction of a moment of holy exhaustion, followed by a solemn, sacred intervention. The stark contrast between shining light and the heavy, almost oppressive angels pulls us out of comfortable religious imagery and confronts us with spiritual ambiguity: divine support is offered, but not always with smiles or angelic songs.

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