The prophet sits in his heavy cloak and looks up.
Bible in art · 1 Kings
An Angel Feeds Elijah
Gustave Doré · 1866 (designs for La Sainte Bible, Tours); this printing 1873–1874
National Library of Poland, Warsaw
The Pannemaker workshop engraved this plate, signing at the bottom right, after Doré’s drawing for the 1866 Bible. The sky is left light and open, so the descending figure seems to glow.
Elijah sits wrapped in his heavy cloak under a scraggy tree on a hillside and looks up, startled. Floating down toward him through the pale sky comes a winged figure in a long robe, holding a jug and round loaves. Beyond stretches a flat desert plain with palms and prickly cactus.
From the text
- “He sat down under a broom tree” (1 Kings 19:4)
- An angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” (1 Kings 19:5)
- “a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water” (1 Kings 19:6)
The artist’s own
- The angel brings the food in person — in the text Elijah finds it by his head
- Prickly-pear cactus, a plant from the Americas common around the Mediterranean in Doré’s day
- A crooked pine-like tree instead of a low broom bush
Details
Elijah
The angel
A winged figure in a long robe floats down through the sky.
The jug
The angel carries a jug of water.
Cactus
Prickly cactus grows on the edge of the plain.
Gustave Doré, French, 1832–1883. National Library of Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa), Warsaw — «Pismo Święte Starego i Nowego Testamentu», vol. 1, Warsaw: M. Glücksberg, 1873 (acc. 75.267 A), tabl. 98 · Wood engraving after Gustave Doré’s design · National Library of Poland (Polona): the record of the volume gives the licence «Domena Publiczna» (Public Domain), «copyrightProtected»: false; the scan was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the library itself («Polona Upload», GLAM-Wiki partnership: “This file was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as part of a GLAM-Wiki partnership between the National Library of Poland and Wikimedia Polska”), linking its Polona record.