The Burial of Ananias (i); and The Punishment of Sapphira (ii)

A native of Carcassonne, in Languedoc, Jacques Gamelin was mainly a painter of battles. He, however, also painted numerous religious scenes and altarpieces for churches in Carcassonne and Narbonne. Gamelin often worked on prepared blue paper and had a preference for using blue washes in his drawings. In the two New Testament scenes presented here he worked on canvas prepared with bright blue wash. Another drawing executed in a similar technique is in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse (inv. 5051).
An attribution to Guillaume Goudin, one of Gamelin’s contemporaries from Toulouse, has also been suggested for these two works.

In these two compositions are depicted episodes from the story of Ananias and Sapphira narrated in the Acts of the Apostles (5: 1-11). As Victor Carlson noted, Gamelin ‘often chose episodes of great complexity, which he treated in drawings with numerous figures gesticulating dramatically…The highly pitched emotional tenor of these scenes is enhanced by Gamelin’s preference for chiaroscuro effects, which he sometimes achieved by covering a sheet of paper with a grey or blue ground … his bold lighting effects, together with his bravura execution, give to these classical themes an emotional expressiveness that seems closer in spirit to the work of Henry Fuseli or James Barry than to any specifically French tradition’ (see R. J. Campbell and V. Carlson, Visions of Antiquity. Neoclassical Figure Drawings, exhib. cat., Los Angeles and elsewhere, 1993-1994, pp.158-159).