Twelve paintings, from Raphael's The Liberation of Saint Peter (1514) to Vincent van Gogh's Prisoners' Round (1890), show what painters have made of confinement: a dungeon, a debtors' jail, a convict wagon, a fortress coming down.
Five of the painters, Hubert Robert, Jacques-Louis David, Gustave Courbet, Richard Dadd and Van Gogh, were locked up themselves and kept working inside, Courbet on fruit brought by his sister, Dadd on fairies ordered by a hospital steward.
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How These Were Chosen
Prisons come back again and again in painting because the setting does much of the work. Stone walls shut the space, iron bars draw hard lines across it, and light has only one way in. The drama has also begun before the painter arrives, since everyone inside is waiting for a trial, a release or an execution.
The list keeps two kinds of pictures. Most show a real place of confinement, not a symbol or a backdrop: a cell, an exercise yard, a barred railway car, an asylum ward. The rest come from painters behind bars, and they show what could still be seen from inside: a bowl of fruit, a garden below an upper floor, a crowd of fairies.
12. Everywhere Is Life, Nikolai Yaroshenko (1888)
Behind the barred window of a convict wagon, a small child grips the wooden sill and looks down at pigeons on the station platform. Around that small face, Nikolai Yaroshenko built Everywhere Is Life, a canvas he painted in 1888.
The child is not alone. Yaroshenko filled the car with people of every age and class: a peasant, a soldier, a workman and the woman holding the child, with a political prisoner at the far end, his back turned.
To Russians in 1888 the scene was familiar. Barred cars like this one carried convicts by rail toward prison, exile or katorga, the forced hard labor that the tsar's courts handed down.
The painter gives no hint of what any of these travelers did. Not one figure is judged, and the only event in the picture is the child watching the birds.
That restraint may owe something to the novelist Leo Tolstoy, who preached forgiveness and love of one's neighbor. The evidence comes late. In 1909, eleven years after Yaroshenko's death, the art critic Sergei Glagol wrote that the painter had been under the spell of Tolstoy's ideas.
Glagol added that Yaroshenko had thought of calling the canvas Where Love Is, God Is. Tolstoy's story of that name tells of a poor shoemaker who finds God by helping the strangers who come by his workshop.
The picture reached the public that year at the 16th Travelling Exhibition. These were the yearly touring shows of the Wanderers, Russian realists who had broken with the Imperial Academy of Arts and sent their work from city to city.
The canvas is tall and narrow, cropped so tight that the wagon is only a fragment: one barred opening and a strip of peeling green paint. Against all that iron and worn wood, the child's small hands are the only soft shapes.
At a Glance
Artist: Nikolai Yaroshenko (1846 to 1898)
Painted: 1888
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 212 × 106 cm (83.5 × 41.7 in)
Where to see it: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
11. The Apostle Paul in Prison, Rembrandt (1627)
An old man sits on a bed in a stone cell, a manuscript on his knees, under a barred window high on the left. He is Paul, the early Christian missionary whose letters are collected in the Bible. The young Rembrandt, about 21 when he painted him, set beside the bed one object that no jailer would ever have let a prisoner keep.