La prédication de Saint Etienne

Charles Joseph Natoire painted this scene of the preaching of Saint Stephen in 1745 for a religious commission, depicting the protomartyr's public address before his stoning — a subject that combined dramatic oratory with the knowledge of impending death. Natoire was one of the leading decorative and religious painters of French Rococo, and his large-scale religious works brought the lightness of the style's colour and gesture to sacred subjects. The Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes holds the painting as part of its collection of French eighteenth-century works. Stephen's preaching, drawn from the Acts of the Apostles, offered painters the opportunity to construct a complex multi-figure composition with a single impassioned figure addressing a crowd, and the formal demands — gesture, expression, spatial recession — were well suited to Natoire's strengths as a draughtsman trained in the grand manner. The Rococo religious painting found a middle ground between Baroque intensity and the decorative refinement associated with secular subjects.

Natoire organises the composition around the contrasting responses of the crowd to Stephen's preaching — belief, hostility, indifference — using varied gesture and expression to animate the scene. The palette is characteristically light, with Rococo rose, pale blue, and gold tones, and the handling of the draperies shows the fluid confidence of an experienced decorative painter.