Esquisse pour l’église de Courbevoie : Saint Paul devant l’Aréopage

Saint Paul stands before the council of the Areopagus on the hill of Athens, his hand raised as he announces the unknown god to the seated philosophers, in this study of 1876 for the decoration of the church of Courbevoie. Edouard Debat-Ponsan, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel, sets the apostle against a luminous sky and the spare architecture of the assembly, a composition that carries the neo-classical gravity of the academic tradition into the decoration of a Parisian parish church. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-arts de la Ville de Paris.