The Mysterious Painting of Christus

Peter Crack, Ph.D

How we define ‘painting’ is a process that forms canons, establishes ‘schools’ and delineates style. Moreover, it can help to build institutions, produce experts and bestow honours. Inevitably, however, this process also generates ghettos, makes amateurs and labels non-conformists. Our parameters may occasionally shift, but certain artists will always reside on the stubborn fringes. This is an account of one such outsider.

During the unseasonably warm February of 1903, Mary of Teck, the future Queen consort to George V, paid a visit to the Doré Gallery in Mayfair. She was not alone. Over the next five months, 200,000 people descended on the galleries at 35 New Bond Street, in the heart of London’s commercial art world. All were there for one reason: to catch a glimpse of the so-called, Mysterious Painting of ‘Christus’, an artwork causing a small sensation across the capital.

Marked by religious fervor, mass appeal, and above all, theatrics, the following events briefly illuminate the life of a little-known painter, struggling to compete in a transitory marketplace. Dismissed by both the traditional academy, and the more vibrant niches of London’s avant-garde, this unusual exhibition casts the artificiality of our received definitions and expectations into sharp relief.

The picture in question was displayed in dramatic isolation. Hung on the far side of a darkened room, the canvas was lit from both sides by shaded oil lamps and framed in draped velvet. The visitors, each charged a shilling, were kept at arm’s length by a velvet rope, adding to the melodrama of the occasion. Once inside, they were greeted by an oval image of Christ’s head and shoulders, bathed in a ‘divine’ light.

A seemingly miraculous event then took place. The painting, ‘is very curious’, wrote the Princess of Wales in her diary, ‘[…] the eyes open and shut’. Indeed, the ‘whole face undergoes a remarkable transformation’, reported one journalist, ‘as the lids droop the expression becomes one of calm serenity’. This apparent animation caused much speculation and wonderment.

While the Bishop of Kensington declared it ‘a great picture full of dignity and sorrow’ and Rev. Payne felt that it satisfied ‘one’s idea of what our blessed Lord must have been like’, the art establishment was less impressed. One commentator questioned the artist’s sincerity, comparing his uncanny effects to those found at the notorious Café du Néant in Montmartre. The bohemia venue employed mirrors and theatrical lighting to macabre effect, seemingly transforming the audience into skeletons before their very own eyes.

Initially, both the artist and techniques behind the ‘Christus’ were a tightly guarded secret. ‘The closest inspection of the picture will be invited’, promised one press release, ‘but the secret lies in the painting and with the artist’. In the wake of this teasing publicity campaign, the author was eventually revealed to be one Harry Herman Salomon (c. 1860–1936), a painter born in east London to a Welsh mother and German father (fig. 1).

A precocious talent, Salomon trained in the Romantic tradition under the tutelage of Karl Müller (1818–93) and Georg Heinrich Crola (1804–79) at the Düsseldorf Academy. After completing his education with trips to Paris and Antwerp, he embarked on a faltering career as a portrait painter. Salomon set about manipulating photographs to create his likenesses, thereby reducing the time needed for formal sittings. It was a technique that appealed to his sporadic patrons from the professional classes, but the results were never likely to impress the critics.

Salomon and his wife, a Parisian ballerina named Victorine Bertrand, eventually settled near Bournemouth. A seemingly sedate seaside resort, Salomon’s theatrical tastes soon resurfaced. In 1890s he formed the Boscombe Bohemian Society, organised the town’s carnival, and provided regular artistic direction for the local theatre, a hobby that doubtless influenced his later paintings.

As for the ‘Christus’, the truth behind the picture was supposed to be revealed at the end of a worldwide tour. Unfortunately, neither this exposé nor the journey itself appears to have taken place. Salomon did, however, provide a rather opaque account of its creation in The Favorite Magazine. Painted in 1901, it was apparently the ‘outcome of a haphazard sketch’ that was then worked upon with reference to the ‘ideal faces of the Hebrews’. As for the trickery, Salomon merely stated that it was the result of much experimentation. As with any illusionist, he clearly had little to gain from providing a peek behind the stage curtain.

Many commentators suggested that mechanical or even lenticular technology had been integrated into the surface of the canvas. Indeed, Salomon used similar techniques elsewhere. In 1904, the Hanover Gallery in Mayfair exhibited Salvator, another of Salomon’s religious paintings with an uncanny dimension. In this instance, Christ’s outstretched arm appeared to protrude from the paint surface; an effect further enhanced by the literal continuation of the canvas onto the gallery floor. Painted to resemble ‘a rough, stony soil’, the picture sprawled around three feet into the room.

The miraculous transition in the ‘Christus’, however, was not an objective phenomenon. The illusion was instead experienced by different people at different times, ruling out the likelihood of any mechanical process. What remains, therefore, is a manipulation of the paint surface, which induces an optical illusion by the very act of looking.

Surviving reproductions are wildly inconsistent and were likely part of the Doré Gallery’s marketing strategy. Nonetheless, a clue exists in the form of a blurry photograph belonging to one of Salomon’s ancestors, which seemingly shows the original artwork in an unadulterated setting (fig. 2).

The effect appears to have been achieved by the subtle application of circular shadows to the upper-right of each eyelid. The ‘eyes’ are therefore both open and closed at once, but the viewer only perceives one state at any given time. The sudden shift between the two results in the curious sense of animation.

Another of Salomon’s so-called ‘trick paintings’ helps to corroborate this theory. The Conscience of Judas was first exhibited in 1905 at the Modern Gallery. The Daily Mail, in a rather scathing review, stated that the ‘same trick of the changing expression’ was again employed. This time, a surviving reproduction goes some way to confirming Salomon’s technique. Shadows have clearly been added to the far left of Judas’ eyelids, giving him the appearance of either looking down at a purse or of glancing sideways, as if caught in the act of counting his ill-gotten silver.  

Salomon was not actually the first artist to bring this particular illusion to the London masses. In 1875, the French Gallery in Pall Mall exhibited a picture of Jesus by the German artist Gabriel von Max (1840–1915) in which ‘the eyes appear to open gradually’. When Salomon was a teenager, the Berlin Photographic Company displayed a large reproduction of the painting in their Oxford Street window. Furthermore, an Italian artist known as Professor Ottoni, produced a similar effect in Christ Dying on the Cross, exhibited on Pall Mall in 1878. That picture was, in turn, inspired by a crucifix at Remagen Cathedral in Germany, which reportedly ‘gave the face the look of life or death according to the point of view of the spectator’.

A modern descendant of the ancient ‘miracle-working’ image, the ‘Christus’ was part of a wider trend in late nineteenth-century popular art, concerned with high levels of verisimilitude and the possibilities of optical illusion. This was, in part, a reaction to the pervasive influence of photography. The popularity of Salomon’s exhibition also reveals a growing appetite for consuming art as a public event, particularly among the new urban masses. Furthermore, his work responded to a renewed interest in the ‘historical Jesus’, a movement that spawned a quest to recreate a more faithful image of the man. None of these concerns, however, were deemed appropriate by the art establishment.

Although Salomon’s painting caused a brief commotion back in 1903, his works were just as quickly forgotten. Compounding this neglect, the current whereabouts of the picture remain unknown. After more than a century, it seems The Mysterious Panting of ‘Christus’ still retains at least one of its secrets.