Study for Christ, Chancel of St. Bartholomew, New York

Francis Augustus Lathrop's preparatory sketch for a monumental ecclesiastical commission demonstrates the careful anatomical study underlying late nineteenth-century religious art. This ink drawing captures the artist's working method—establishing proportions, drapery fall, and pose through fluid line work before translating the design to the church chancel. Lathrop, a prominent American decorator and muralist, employed this classical approach to figure drawing, refining gesture and composition at full scale. The sketch's directness reveals the artist's confident hand and the deliberate process by which ambitious public works were realized in the Gilded Age.