A feast has no attribute

Every entry in this catalogue that names a person can, in principle, be identified by an object. This one names a day. All Saints is the feast that gathers the whole calendar at once, including the unnamed, and by definition it cannot be assigned a wheel, a lion or a set of keys — the point of the observance is that the roll is too long to read. What the tradition supplies instead is a place and a season: the graveyard, the beginning of November, and the traffic of people who go there.

What the record holds

The entry is dated 1888 and gives the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, Nancy, France as its location. The dimensions are 254 x 334 cm, very large and horizontal. The style is given as Realism and the nationality as French; the measured colour family is ochre.

Filed with no religious category

The index puts this work under group portraiture and stops. There is no Religion heading on the entry, no cultural heritage heading, nothing devotional at all. For a title naming a feast of the church that is a striking omission, and it is also a defensible reading: what a nineteenth-century picture of All Saints contains is a crowd of contemporary people out of doors. 4 titles in this catalogue contain the words All Saints, and one of them is a church in south London.