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One of Blake’s patrons described him as ‘a most fervent admirer of the Bible’. Here, Blake illustrates a scene from the Gospel of St Luke. While Christ prays in the Garden of Gethsemane (before being betrayed by Judas and arrested), an angel comes to give him strength. Blake depicts this moment of Jesus’s spiritual agony, as his disciples sleep around him. This painting is one of a group of biblical subjects Blake made for his patron Thomas Butts. He used an experimental tempera formula that was very unstable, resulting in surface cracking and darkening over time.

Gallery label, October 2023

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\n

One of Blake’s patrons described him as ‘a most fervent admirer of the Bible’. Here, Blake illustrates a scene from the Gospel of St Luke. While Christ prays in the Garden of Gethsemane (before being betrayed by Judas and arrested), an angel comes to give him strength. Blake depicts this moment of Jesus’s spiritual agony, as his disciples sleep around him. This painting is one of a group of biblical subjects Blake made for his patron Thomas Butts. He used an experimental tempera formula that was very unstable, resulting in surface cracking and darkening over time. 

\n
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N05894 The Agony in the Garden c. 1799–1800\n

\n

N 05894 / B 425\n
Tempera on iron 270×380 (10 5/8×15), 3 ( 1/8) cut off diagonally at each corner\n
Signed ‘WB inv’ in monogram, damaged, b.r.\n
Presented by the Executors of W. Graham Robertson through the National Art-Collections Fund 1949\n
PROVENANCE Thomas Butts; Thomas Butts jun.; Capt. F.J. Butts, offered Sotheby's 24 June 1903 (14) £28 bt in Dimsdale; his widow, sold April 1906 through Carfax to W. Graham Robertson, offered Christie's 22 July 1949 (30, repr.) £420 bt his executors\n
EXHIBITED Carfax 1904 (11); Carfax 1906 (3); Arts Council 1951 (30, pl.9); Tate Gallery 1978 (139, repr.)\n
LITERATURE Rossetti 1863, p.227 no.153, and 1880, p.240 no.177; Preston 1952, p.59, no.12 pl. 12; Keynes Bible\n1957, pp. xiii, 38 no.134 repr. and colour pl. vii; Blunt 1959, p.67; Kremen 1972, pp.154, 253 n.128, pl.10; Bindman 1977, p.124; Paley 1978, p.55; Butlin 1981, pp.332–3 no.425, colour pl.509\n

\n

This is an illustration to Luke, xxii, 41–4. Blake seems to suggest the detail of Christ's sweat ‘as it were red drops of blood falling down to the ground’.\n
\n
The picture was restored in 1917 (repr. before and after, Burlington Magazine, XXXII, 1918, p.17) and again in 1949. The original paint is missing in many places. William Rossetti lists this work, under the title ‘Christ in the Garden, sustained by an Angel’, as an ‘Oil picture (?) on copper’. Blake was, of course, averse to the use of oil paint and seems never to have used it.\n
\n
Although most of Blake's tempera paintings on metal seem to be on copper recent analysis by Brian Gilmore of the New Armouries at the Tower of London has shown that the support in this case is iron, almost certainly coated with a form of tin. On the painted side, underlying Blake's usual white ground, there is a layer of red paint, probably red lead. This suggests that Blake used a piece of metal already used in some completely unrelated artefact.

\n

\n
Published in:\n
Martin Butlin, William Blake 1757-1827, Tate Gallery Collections, V, London 1990\n

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