In the treatment of Jonah, the type of The Resurrection, the painter has avoided what must always be a difficulty--the great fish. Those who saw this _tableau_ years ago at Ober-Ammergau must remember that even the good souls of that village could not divest the subject of the ludicrous element, and they did well, in 1890, to omit it. But Flandrin has got over the difficulty by making his prophet walking upon a beach, with waves breaking upon the shore around him. He has been ejected from the whale, and is giving thanks for his deliverance. _Signum Jonæ Prophetæ_ (Matthew xii. 39).
_That the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the Gospel_, is the legend of the charge to Peter. _Gentes esse cohaeredes ... promissionis in Christo_ (Ephesians iii. 6). In the foreground kneels S. Peter, to whom Our Lord gives the keys of heaven and hell: but the rest of the Apostles stand around, and form part of the group: _Feed my sheep._ The type is The Dispersion of the Nations subsequent to the building of Babel; and Flandrin has most graphically described the wonder and amazement of the crowd, who, not being able to converse any longer, leave the town and scatter themselves over the face of the earth.
Above the frieze of subject-pictures are numerous personages in the panels which surround the windows, all from the Old Testament: Adam and Eve, Jacob Blessing his Children, Job, Samson, Aaron, Joshua, Miriam, Deborah, Judith, and ending with John the Baptist. Adam and Eve are, perhaps, the finest of these figures. Adam stands erect, thoughtful, repentant, and ashamed; but his clasped right hand seems to indicate steadfastness of purpose to retrieve the past. Eve abandons herself to sorrow, and leans upon her husband's shoulder as if resolving in the future to depend upon him. The treatment is at once almost Classic in its simplicity, and realistic in its naturalism; the only discordant note being a something in the way in which Eve's hair falls upon her forehead, an echo, as it were, of the model, and the ugly fashion of dressing the hair peculiar to the thirties and forties, which so often shocks us in the Nymphs and Venuses by Etty, and gives them an unclothed appearance.