St. Paul Preaching to the Thessalonians
Gustave Doré, 1866 · 1 Thessalonians 2:11
The passage
As ye know how we exhorted and comforted and charged every one of you, as a father doth his children,
1 Thessalonians 2:11
About this plate
The inside of a synagogue, drawn in hard perspective. Paul stands at the left with an arm raised, and the seated congregation runs away from him down the length of the plate in ranked rows, becoming smaller and smaller until the figures at the far end are indistinct. High windows throw light down the wall.
The perspective is doing something almost aggressive. Doré has put the vanishing point behind the crowd rather than behind the speaker, so the eye is pulled away from Paul and down the rows, and the size of the audience is the fact you come away with.
The verse is not about crowds at all. It is one of the tenderest sentences Paul ever wrote: As ye know how we exhorted and comforted and charged every one of you, as a father doth his children.
Every one of you. Against the rows in this picture, that phrase becomes an enormous claim. The plate shows the scale and the sentence insists on the individual, and the two of them together are more interesting than either alone.
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