From across the room it is a face crowned with thorns, the eyes sunk in shadow. Up close, the hair falling to his shoulders opens out and turns into the hill: down there stand the three crosses of Calvary, the middle one bearing the body and the other two to either side. They are two pictures in the same hoop, and which one you see depends on where you are standing. This one wants a wall and a few steps back, not a small frame on a side table.

It is 200 x 300 stitches, about 36 by 54 centimetres on 14-count, and not one cell is left bare: all 60,000 are worked. Just two threads, black DMC 310 and light grey DMC 02, but three of every four stitches are black, so one runs down far faster than the other. What makes it slow is not difficulty but the scatter: nearly 6,000 stitches, one in ten, have no neighbour of their own colour, mostly through the hair and the background. It goes better if you cover all the black in an area and leave the grey till last, rather than changing thread every second stitch.