The Wine Press

Spencer Stanhope painted 'The Wine Press' in 1864, a religious allegory drawn from the Book of Revelation (14:19-20) where the winepress is an image of divine wrath and judgment — the gathering of the nations for punishment at the end of time. The subject was unusual in Victorian painting, which generally favoured the gentler narratives of the New Testament over the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation, and Spencer Stanhope's choice of such a theme signals both his theological seriousness and his attraction to the visually dramatic possibilities of eschatological imagery. The National Gallery's canvas shows him at an ambitious stage of his development, working on a large scale with a subject that demanded both figurative skill and symbolic imagination. The Pre-Raphaelite tradition within which he worked had treated religious subjects with historicist authenticity, but Spencer Stanhope's approach here reaches more directly for the visionary.

The oil on canvas handles the challenging subject of apocalyptic vision through a combination of Pre-Raphaelite precision and more overtly symbolic compositional organisation. Figures engaged in the pressing of grapes that becomes, in the allegorical reading, a pressing of humanity are rendered with physical specificity while the overall scene takes on an atmosphere of ominous significance beyond ordinary naturalism.