Saint Hugh in the Refectory

Description

Historians of Spanish painting have long pointed to this refectory scene as the clearest demonstration of what restraint can do in the hands of a painter who trusted it completely. Saint Hugh in the Refectory reproduction prints and surveys alike single out the same passage: a wall of white habits, barely varied in tone, that somehow holds the eye longer than incident would.

About Saint Hugh in the Refectory Reproduction

The subject is a legend from the founding of the Carthusian order. Saint Bruno of Cologne and six companions sit at a long table in a bare dining hall, served a meal by Hugh of Chateauneuf, then Bishop of Grenoble, and his attendant page. The brothers had received meat from Hugh and fallen into argument over whether to break their fast, then into a trance-like sleep that lasted weeks. When Hugh arrived and leaned over their plates, he saw the meat had turned to ash, the sign that confirmed the rule against eating flesh would allow no exception.

Zurbaran paints the Carthusians almost as a single mass of drapery, broken only by the fall of light across folds of white wool and the dull sheen of earthenware on the table. There is barely a gesture among the seated monks; the drama sits entirely in the stillness and in the handling of that near-monochrome range, built from grey, cream, and the faintest warm shadow. The picture belongs to his maturity, when he had moved past the sharper contrasts of his earlier work toward this quieter, more sustained tonal control, and the still life of bread, plates, and cloth reads with the same attention he gave to figures.

The hand-painted reproduction

ByMuseum paints this Saint Hugh in the Refectory reproduction entirely by hand in oil on canvas, rebuilding that narrow tonal range stroke by stroke rather than reproducing it as a flat image. A trained artist works through the greys and whites of the habits in sequence, laying in the underpainting before building the raised, textured surface that catches light the way oil paint does and a printed sheet cannot. The oil on canvas reproduction is matched against the original palette and scaled to suit the large, processional composition, so the finished canvas carries the same weight across a wall that the refectory scene carries in the original.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas, not printed
• Available in multiple sizes to suit the scale of the original
• Gallery-ready presentation on arrival
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days