Eugène Delacroix's mural of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, painted between 1855 and 1861 for the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, is one of the supreme achievements of Romantic religious painting - a work that Charles Baudelaire, with characteristic hyperbole but considerable insight, declared the greatest painting of the 19th century.
The biblical source is Genesis 32:22-32, one of the most mysterious and theologically loaded episodes in the entire Hebrew Bible. Jacob, returning to his homeland after twenty years' absence and facing a potentially violent reunion with his brother Esau, spends the night alone at the ford of the Jabbok. 'A man wrestled with him till daybreak,' Genesis 32:24 records - the identity of the 'man' left deliberately ambiguous in the Hebrew text. When the stranger cannot prevail, he touches Jacob's hip socket, dislocating it. Jacob refuses to release him without a blessing, and the stranger declares: 'Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome' (Genesis 32:28).
The episode resists straightforward interpretation. Is the 'man' an angel? God himself? A projection of Jacob's internal struggle? The tradition of Christian and Jewish commentary has insisted on all three simultaneously, making the Jabbok encounter a model of the ambiguous, costly, transformative nature of genuine encounter with the divine. Paul alludes to the pattern in Romans: one does not encounter God without being changed, and change is often preceded by struggle.
Delacroix chose to represent the struggle as a scene of physical wrestling in a sunlit world of extraordinary richness: the two figures grip and strain against each other in the foreground while behind them a luminous forest opens into golden light. Jacob is depicted in the full power of his mature strength; the angel is slightly taller, more composed, but engaged with Jacob's effort rather than easily overcoming him. The detail of the hip dislocation - Jacob's lasting wound from the encounter - is not depicted; Delacroix focuses on the struggle itself, on the moment of maximum engagement before the resolution.
Delacroix worked on the Saint-Sulpice chapel for more than a decade alongside two companion murals: Heliodorus Driven from the Temple and The Triumph of Jacob (or Saint Michael Vanquishing the Devil). The chapel commission was one of the most demanding of his career, requiring him to sustain his vision across an architectural space that he returned to repeatedly as his health declined.
Baudelaire's enthusiasm for the mural was partly aesthetic - he admired the Venetian color, the Rubensian energy - and partly philosophical: the image of human struggle with divine power as a model for artistic and spiritual engagement resonated with his own Romantic sensibility.
The Chapel of the Holy Angels in Saint-Sulpice is open to visitors as part of the church, located on the Place Saint-Sulpice in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. The murals are in good condition and the chapel is frequently visited by those interested in French Romantic painting.