Jacob's Dream
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Genesis 28:12
The passage
And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
Genesis 28:12
About this plate
Jacob is asleep in the bottom left corner, on the ground, under a heavy gnarled tree, wrapped in his cloak with his head on the stone. He takes up perhaps a tenth of the plate.
The rest is the ladder, and Doré draws it as a staircase — broad, shallow steps of light rising out of the shrubs behind him to a single blazing star at the top. It is crowded. Angels stand on the steps, sit on them, lean over the edges, drift alongside; the higher they go the more they dissolve into the light until you cannot count them. One large angel is seated at the lower right, close enough to the sleeping man to touch him.
The King James says ladder, and every painter reaches for rungs. Doré builds a stair instead, and it changes the traffic entirely. On a ladder they would queue. On a staircase they can gather, pause, turn round, come back down.
Note where the light stops. It reaches the shrubs. It does not reach Jacob. He is lit by nothing, sleeping through the whole of it, and the plate is careful to keep him in the dark.
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