Year: ca. 1903
Size: 51 5/8 x 39 inches
Condition: B+ / slight creases
In ominous shades of slate and dark blue, Gray depicts a scene from Maurice Donnay's 1903 play, The Return from Jerusalem. "Maurice Donnay collaborated on the Annales de la Patrie française and caused a sensation on the boulevards with an anti-Semitic play, Retour de Jérusalem. Donnay began his career, as we have seen, at the Chat Noir, descended to the boulevards where he made a reputation as an author of light comedies and ended an honored member of the Académie française. Nationalists from Lemaître to Simone de Beauvoir's father adored Donnay plays, perhaps because the typical Donnay hero—an aging boulevardier, debonair, experienced, gray at the temples but still handsome—represented a flattering portrait of themselves" (The Politics of Resentment, p. 449). Below the Christ figure here, the text reads: "On seeing this lamentable flock of my persecuted and hunted coreligionists, I swore to myself to avenge those of my race."
