John turns his head over his shoulder, eyes wide.
Bible in art · Revelation
John on Patmos
Gustave Doré · 1866 (designs for La Sainte Bible, Tours); this printing 1873–1874
National Library of Poland, Warsaw
Pannemaker and Doms cut this block for the Bible of 1866, and it is one of the darkest of the book: nearly every part is covered with close, wavy lines.
John sits alone on a rock above the sea, wrapped in a hooded mantle, a writing tablet on his knee and a pen in his hand. He has stopped writing and looks over his shoulder, startled. A slanting beam of light breaks through the storm clouds and falls on his face and hands; below, the dark sea stretches to a low horizon.
From the text
- “I, John… was on the island of Patmos” (Revelation 1:9)
- “I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet” (Revelation 1:10)
- “Write on a scroll what you see” (Revelation 1:11)
The artist’s own
- A flat tablet and a quill instead of a scroll
- A stormy sky and a single beam of light for the voice behind him
- John shown as a young man, as painters often showed him
Details
Looking back
The pen
He holds a quill pen in his raised hand.
The tablet
A writing board rests on his knee.
The sea
Dark water stretches away below the rock.
Gustave Doré, French, 1832–1883. National Library of Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa), Warsaw — «Pismo Święte Starego i Nowego Testamentu», vol. 2, Warsaw: M. Glücksberg, 1874 (acc. 75.267 A) · 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.