The episode depicted in this work is the one recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (12, 1-8), which describes how when Jesus was walking through the grainfields on the Sabbath, his disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. The Pharisees reproached them for doing so on the Sabbath and Christ answered them: ‘If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’, you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath’. The theme is part of the canon in Catholicism, but is not frequent in Baroque painting. However, it is a good excuse on some occasions, such as this one, to arrange figures in a large landscape and provide a growing genre with the rhetorical justification that it needed.

The classical arrangement of the space and the presence of the ruined arches, along with the severe tone of the character, link the work with the tradition of Cluade de Lorrain, even though it is rather cool in the strictest French style. In the same way as the other canvas of the pair, the attribution at the time of its purchase to Pierre Patel (The Elder) (1605-1676) is plausible but cannot be fully confirmed.

Alfonso Pérez Sánchez