The angel who opens a door

The liberating angel of Acts is a physical agent: chains fall, gates open, a man walks out. That is an office of intervention in the material world, and the source gives its holder neither a name nor a rank. Five of the 224 titles in this catalogue name Peter, and the catalogue holds another entry on this same episode by a seventeenth-century Spanish painter, so the subject is represented here more than once.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1848 and gives William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a French painter, with Academicism as the style term. No dimensions are recorded. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded.

After, not during

The title places the moment after the release rather than at it, which is a choice the record preserves and worth reporting: the angel's work is finished and the man is outside. Academic painting of the nineteenth century often took episodes at their aftermath rather than at their crisis. Neither dimensions nor a location is on file for this entry, and the style term recorded is Academicism.