Jesus and the Disciples Going to Emmaus
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Luke 24:26
The passage
Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?
Luke 24:26
About this plate
Three figures walking a road at evening, seen mostly from behind. The land is low and open; a town shows on the horizon at the right; the sky is worked in long horizontal lines from edge to edge. Nothing else is in the plate.
Doré gives you no way of telling which one he is. All three are wrapped, all three are walking at the same pace, and the one nearest the centre is turned slightly toward the others as if mid-sentence. That is the whole content of the picture, and it is exactly right.
The verse is a question, and a rebuking one: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? He is explaining the last three days to two men who were there and understood none of it.
Luke says a few lines later that their eyes were holden, that they should not know him. Doré illustrates the holding rather than the recognition. The revelation happens later, indoors, over bread — and by then the road, which is the part he drew, is behind them.
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