The Stairway to Heaven

Arent de Gelder’s painting strikes one at once with the wonder of a marvellous dream and a concrete, wild sense of the real. This duality is what is so enchanting about the story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28. It is a story of various crossings-over and overlappings: dream and waking, heaven and earth, light and darkness. Jacob, fleeing his brother’s wrath, undertakes the long journey to his uncle in Haran and finds himself at Bethel, where he decides to spend the night. In this wild place, with a rock for a pillow, he sees in a dream a stairway reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it.

De Gelder’s painting of this scene was a favourite among 19th-century artists and critics. Until late in that century, it was thought to be the work of Rembrandt. William Hazlitt believed it to be “perhaps the most purely poetical work that he [Rembrandt] ever produced.”[1] The painting was copied by many artists in the nineteenth century, including the great landscape painter John Constable. But what is it about this painting that so fascinated its 19th-century admirers?

The subject of the painting, of course, appeals strongly to the Romantic sensibility—with the transcendent breaking into the mundane in the form of a sublime vision, and the fact that this vision occurs in a wild setting far from civilisation. These are bread and butter to the Romantics. But beyond the subject, I think the answer also lies in the composition of the work. Among depictions of Jacob’s dream, De Gelder’s is unique. Most strikingly: there is no ladder or stairway.

We see Jacob lying exhausted on his back in the bottom-left corner, his rucksack cast aside and his clothes hung on a tree—reflecting his physical and mental state. The surrounding landscape is indistinct, wild, and dark. The horizon is dimly lit by the receding dusk, against which deep silhouettes of two mountains—one near and one distant—suggest an impressively vast expanse. But equally impressive as the painting’s horizontal depth is its immense sense of verticality. As one’s eyes follow the beams of light upward from the small figure in the corner, they meet a magisterial winged figure descending toward the weary traveller. Higher up, we see the source of the light: an opening in the clouds, shaped like the mouth of a cave slanting upward, with light spilling out of it—light gushing out from an abundance of light. At the mouth of the cloud-cave stands another radiant figure.

De Gelder—often dismissed as a minor painter who maintained Rembrandt’s style long after it had fallen out of fashion—displays here a power of imagination capable of envisioning this scene in a completely novel and powerful way, demanding a greater estimation of his abilities.

But there is more to see beyond the painting’s unique composition. It is also charged with theological insight. We read in Genesis that, in the dream, God confirms to Jacob the covenant he had made to Abraham and Isaac:

“Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen 28:14)

An interesting detail to notice in this passage is the difference in the wording of the covenant compared to how it is given to Abraham and Isaac. Both Abraham and Isaac are told that their offspring shall be as numerous as the stars of heaven. But Jacob is given the metaphor of dust—reminiscent of the creation of Adam, who was formed from the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7). It is striking that in this heavenly vision, our attention is once again drawn to the earth.

Like the passage, the painting also directs our attention back to the earth. Notice that the angel approaching Jacob has his right hand raised and is pointing somewhere to the left of Jacob. But where exactly is he pointing? Is it to the tree? Or to the nearby mountain?

I mentioned earlier that De Gelder did not depict a stairway or ladder. But upon further inspection, one finds that there is indeed a stairway—albeit a subtle one. Jacob is on it! Notice how De Gelder placed Jacob in a very awkward position, on what looks like a set of rocky steps. This suggests that De Gelder may have had some knowledge of the landscape of the Holy Land. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia describes the area of Bethel where Jacob’s dream occurred as “bleak and barren, the hills being marked by a succession of stony terraces, which may have suggested the form of the ladder in Jacob's famous dream.” De Gelder’s painting integrates the realistic depiction of the landscape with the mystical nature of the dream.

The stairway in De Gelder’s painting does not lead to heaven as we might expect (see, for instance, Blake’s depiction). Rather, it leads to a tree—one that has the rough shape of a cross. Taken as such, Jacob’s Dream becomes a profound meditation on Christ’s fulfilment of the covenant, the offspring of Jacob in whom all nations are blessed: he became man (formed from the dust of the earth) and ascended Mount Golgotha to the cross, revealing himself as the true stairway reconciling heaven and earth. As Christ tells Nathanael in John 1:51:

“You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

The way to heaven is the way of the cross. And this is the journey we are invited to undertake when we remember Christ’s journey to the cross.

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Notes

1. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, eds., The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, vol. 9 (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1903), 50.

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Arent de Gelder, Jacob’s Dream, c.1715, Oil on canvas, 66.7 x 56.9 cm, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Arent de Gelder (1645 - 1727) was a Dutch artist and one of the last pupils of Rembrandt van Rijn. He was born into a wealthy family in Dordrecht in the Netherlands. His first art instructor was Samuel van Hoogstraten, one of the leading painters in Dordrecht at the time. He moved to Amsterdam to study under Rembrandt from around 1662 to 1664, after which he returned to Dordrecht. De Gelder never depended on his painting for a living thanks to his family’s wealth, which gave him the liberty to keep painting in Rembrandt’s style of the 1660s, even after it had fallen out of fashion.

Otto Bam a South African writer and musician. He is the co-editor of ArtWay and the arts manager for the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. Otto has a master’s degree in English Studies from Stellenbosch University, South Africa, as well as master’s degree in religion and literature from the University of Edinburgh.

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