''What Our Lord Saw from the Cross'' () is a c. 1890

watercolor Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (Commonwealth English; see American and British English spelling differences#-our, -or, spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin 'water'), is a painting metho ...

painting by the French painter

James Tissot Jacques Joseph Tissot (; 15 October 1836 – 8 August 1902), better known as James Tissot ( , ), was a French painter, illustrator, and caricaturist. He was born to a drapery merchant and a milliner and decided to pursue a career in art at a y ...

. The work is unusual for its portrayal of the

Crucifixion of Jesus The crucifixion of Jesus was the death of Jesus by being crucifixion, nailed to a cross.The instrument of Jesus' crucifixion, instrument of crucifixion is taken to be an upright wooden beam to which was added a transverse wooden beam, thus f ...

from the perspective of

Jesus Jesus (AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and many Names and titles of Jesus in the New Testament, other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the Jesus in Chris ...

on the cross, rather than featuring Christ at the center of the work. The scene shows witnesses, including Jesus' followers ( the women and the disciple whom Jesus loved), participants, and bystanders; of Jesus' own body only the feet can be seen, at the bottom of the picture. The painting is part of the series ''The Life of Jesus Christ'', a series of 350 watercolors of events from the Gospels completed by Tissot. He prepared for these by extensive travels in the

Middle East The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...

to study details of contemporary life, which he used in the paintings. Prints were also published of the compositions. The whole watercolor series, completed between 1886 and 1894, was acquired in 1900 by the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...

in New York.

References

External links

View from the Cross
by Ronald Klip (artbible.info) Paintings of the Crucifixion of Jesus Paintings by James Tissot Horses in art Paintings of Mary Magdalene Paintings of the Virgin Mary Watercolor paintings {{19C-painting-stub