Jacob’s fight with the angel

The wrestling, at wall scale

The same night-long struggle appears elsewhere in this catalogue on canvases of a metre or so. The record gives this one as 714 x 485 cm. That is not a picture but a wall, and the recorded location explains it: Saint-Sulpice in Paris, a church rather than a museum, which means the entry describes a work made for the place it still occupies.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1861 and gives Eugène Delacroix, a French painter, with the style term Romanticism. The measured colour family is green. Its subject categories are the detail worth pausing on: alongside Religion, the record files this entry under landscape, forest and tree. That is an unusual filing for an angelic subject, and it is the record's own, not an inference.

An angel inside a wood

Scale and setting change what an angel is for. In an altarpiece the celestial ranks are arranged around a throne and the hierarchy is the composition. In a wrestling scene set among trees there is no hierarchy to arrange — one figure, one opponent, and a landscape large enough to make both small. The nineteenth century kept exactly this kind of angel and let the choirs go, because a single unnamed adversary needs no doctrine to be legible.