The Menorah (1993)

Hanging in St Giles Lady Chapel for a number of years was the painting 'Menorah (1993)'
Oil on canvas.61 x 76 inches

The painting by the British visionary painter Roger Wagner and was formerly owned by the Diocese of Oxford. It was hung in St Giles until March 2010. In 2009 it was acquired for the Ashmolean Museum Oxford through Anthony Mould Ltd and with the generous support of Blackwall Green Insurance, the Jerusalem Trust, Guy & Rose Monson and other anonymous donors.

"In this dramatic work, several strands merge: the Renaissance, the pastoral, English landscape and poetry, and Christian biblical meditation. Jesus is naked on the cross, the thieves on either side. The plowed field is flooded, reflecting the cooling towers which loom even closer than before, in a more sinister way. The onlookers, dressed in Hasidic clothes, gather and drift, seeking comfort, pointing in silent witness, or simply standing, desolate, inconsolable in their isolated grief.

The composition of some of the figures has a revealing source: a photograph taken by Dmitri Baltemants in the Crimea in 1942, which shows women looking for their loved ones among the bodies which lie strewn across a bleak, smoke-filled landscape. This haunting photograph of grief shows one woman stooped in despair as she searches, and another with arms flung out in a gesture of despair. The words of Jesus on the cross echo this abandonment: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And that cry was made by a Jew to the God of the Jews.

Emotions are stirred by such iconography, because the Jewish people suffered persecution in an ostensibly Christian culture. Christian anti-Semitism should lead to Christian repentance. And yet there is a glimmer of hope in the fragile, vulnerable body stretched upon the cross." (Read description)

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