Saint Serapion

Description

Bone white against near black: that is the whole chromatic drama of Saint Serapion. The habit of the Mercedarian monk is painted in a white that shifts to ivory, grey, and the faintest blue in its shadowed folds, and it sits in a field of darkness so complete that the figure seems to have no setting at all. This Saint Serapion reproduction holds that contrast at its centre, because the colour is the argument the picture makes about suffering withheld rather than shown.

About Saint Serapion Reproduction

Painted in 1628 for the funerary hall of the Mercedarian monastery in Seville, the work shows the three-quarter-length body of Serapion filling most of the canvas, his hands bound by rope and chain to a horizontal pole above him, his head fallen to one side. There are no wounds, no blood, nothing that announces martyrdom as violence. Zurbaran paints a man recently dead, held upright by his bindings, and lets the slack weight of the body and the collapse of the head do the work that gore would do in another artist hands. The white habit catches light from an unseen source at the upper left, raking across the chest and down the heavy drapery that falls in blocks and planes almost like carved stone.

That sculptural handling of cloth, learned in part from the tenebrism that had travelled north from the followers of Caravaggio, marks an early high point in the career of Zurbaran, years before his later work for Carthusian and Hieronymite houses across Spain. The brushwork in the drapery is built in distinct, almost architectural passages, each fold given its own plane of light and shade, while the face and hands are modelled more softly, with a stillness that reads as peace rather than agony. The dark ground is not empty; it is layered and worked, giving the black a depth that a flat printed surface could never hold.

The hand-painted reproduction

Our painters recreate this oil on canvas reproduction by hand, working layer by layer to match the chalky whites of the habit against the enveloping darkness, and to keep the ropes at the wrists taut and precise against the heavier folds of cloth. This is an oil painting reproduction built with a trained eye for condition and surface: the impasto in the lit edges of the drapery, the thin, worked darkness of the ground, the slight unevenness of hand-laid pigment that a collector looks for and a printed copy cannot offer. Hung where the light falls low and from one side, in a hallway, a study, or a room kept deliberately spare, this Saint Serapion holds its quiet without needing a crowd of other objects near it, and settles into the kind of steady, unchanging presence that a room visited daily comes to depend on.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade canvas, brushwork and texture faithful to the original
• Available in sizes proportional to the 120 x 103 cm original, with custom sizing on request
• Gallery-ready presentation, suited to framing or display as finished
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country