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About a dozen men and women gather around three men hanging from wooden crosses, all against a deep landscape beneath a shiny gold sky in this horizontal painting. All the people we can see have pale or tanned skin. The men on the crosses wear only white loincloths, and a gold halo encircles the head of the man in the middle, Jesus. Jesus hangs with his hands and feet nailed to the cross, and a man on the ground has pierced his right side with a lance. Blood drips down his face from a ring of thorns. Four winged angels, small in scale to the rest of the people, catch the blood pouring from the nails in his hands and feet, and the wound on his side in golden chalices. The crosses to either side angle in toward Jesus, and the men are tied to them with their arms hooked backward over the crosspiece. Their legs are tied to the vertical beam of the cross, and they bleed from wounds on their thighs. Near the head of the man to our left, an angel hovers and holds up a miniature man, like a doll. The man on the cross to our right turns his head away from the demon holding out another miniature man. Across the bottom of the composition, the people in the crowd wear garments in ginger brown, cranberry and burgundy red, and olive green. Three women, two young men, and a man on horseback are tightly clustered on the ground in the left half. The woman closest to us, Mary, wears a marine-blue gown and a white head covering. She is partly slumped to one side, supported by a woman on her left, to our right, and a young man standing just behind her. The third woman kneels on Mary’s other side, near the lower left corner of the composition, with her hands clasped together. Behind the women, the horse and its elderly, bearded rider and the cleanshaven man piercing Jesus’s side with a spear both look up at Jesus. The rider touches his left eye with the index finger of that hand, and short, red rays emanate from his eyelid. Near the back end of the horse, a man holds a bucket and a long pole supporting a sponge in a U-shaped crook at the top. A cluster of eight men are gathered in the lower right half. Two are on horseback, and the rider closest to us wears peanut-brown armor and helmet. He holds a tall staff with a red pennant bearing the letters “SPQR.” Beyond the crosses, pale green hills topped with trees and bushes lead back to a town skyline painted in shades of baby and teal blue. Scenes with people, tiny in scale, are scattered across the city and landscape. There, a crowd greeting a man entering the city on a donkey is seen in the distance to our left. A group lowers a man from a cross on a hill to our right, and a man hangs from a tree along the right edge of the composition. The gold sky fills the top quarter of the scene.

Master of the Death of Saint Nicholas of Münster

Calvary, c. 1470/1480

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 35-A

Medium

oil on panel

Dimensions

overall: 129.5 x 199.5 cm (51 x 78 9/16 in.)

Credit Line

Patrons' Permanent Fund

Accession Number

2001.70.1

Artists / Makers

Master of the Death of Saint Nicholas of Münster (painter) German, active c. 1460 - 1490

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Inscription

on the leg of the figure in lower right: N V S

Provenance

Léon Tabourier; (his estate sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 20-22 June 1898, no. 193, as Ecole Allemande); (Durand-Ruel et Cie, Paris). (F. Kleinberger Galleries, Paris), in 1913. André J. Seligmann [1898-1945], Paris, by 1938;[1] his heirs; (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, New York, 27 January 2000, no. 49); purchased jointly by (Bernheimer, Munich), (Otto Nauman, New York), and (Alfred Bader, Milwaukee); purchased 6 June 2001 by NGA.

[1] The painting was confiscated by the Nazis in July 1940 from the collection of André Seligmann and taken to the Germany Embassy in Paris (See Verzeichnis der im Juli 1940 durch die Geheime Feldpolizei in Paris gesicherten und in die Deutsche Botschaft überbrachten Gegenstände aus jüdischen Kunsthandlungen, p. 8-9, National Archives RG260/Ardelia Hall Collection/Box 469/File VII and ERR card no. SEL 545, as Westphalian, second half of the 15th century, National Archives RG260/Property Division/Box 19-20, both copies in NGA curatorial files). It was transferred to the Jeu de Paume from where it was removed by Hermann Goering on 5 November 1940 (OSS Consolidated Report #2, The Goering Collection, 15 September 1945, Attachment 5, List der für die Sammlung des Reichsmarschalls Hermann Goering abgegebenen Kunstgegenstände dated 20 October 1942, no. 236, National Archives RG239/Entry 73/Box 78, copy NGA curatorial files). The records of the Munich Central Collecting Point indicate that the painting was recovered in Berchtesgaden and restituted to France on 30 October 1946 (see Munich property card #6772/1722 as Flemish c. 1480, National Archives RG260/Box 503, and French Receipt for Cultural Objects No. 14A, item no. 121, National Archives RG260/Box 287, copies NGA curatorial files). In 1951 the Office des Biens Privés deposited the painting at the Musée du Louvre in Paris (M.N.R. number 622). The painting remained there until 1999, when it was returned to André Seligmann's two daughters.

Associated Names

Bernheimer Fine Arts Ltd.
Christie, Manson & Woods, Ltd.
Drouot, Hôtel
Durand-Ruel et Cie
ERR
Goering, Hermann, Reichsmarschall
Kleinberger Gallery
Munich Central Collecting Point
Musée du Louvre
Seligmann, André J.
Tabourier, Léon

Exhibition History

1913: Stadtisches Museum Dortmund, 1913.

1934: Tafelbilder des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1934, no. 82, pl. XXXIII, as Low German (Nikolaus van Soest?).

1936: Tentoonstelling van Oude Kunst uit het bezit van den Internationalen Handel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1936, no. 5, as by Rhenish School, attributed to Nikolaus van Soest.

1938: Exposition de Paysages de 1400 à 1900, André Seligmann, Paris, 1938, no. 16, repro., as by Master NVS.

1951: On display with the permanent collection, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1951-1999.

1960: Exposition des 700 tableaux de toutes les écoles antérieurs à 1800 tirés des réserves du département des peintures, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 1960, no. 4, as Ecole du Rhein inférieur.

Bibliography

1918: Heise, Carl Georg. "Norddeutsche Malerei: Studien zu ihrer Entwicklungsgeschichte im 15. Jahrhundert von Köln bis Hamburg." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kiel. Leipzig, 1918: 143, under no. 29.

1938: Schöne, Wolfgang. Dieric Bouts und seine Schule. Berlin and Leipzig, 1938: 122.

1954: Stange, Alfred. Deutsche Malerei der Gotik, Munich and Berlin, 1954: 53-54, fig. 89.

1962: Adhémar, Hélène. Le Musée national du Louvre, Paris: Les primitifs flamands, Corpus. Brussels,1962: 1:37, no. 7, as Rhenish School.

1967: Stange, Alfred. Kritisches Verzeichnis der deutschen Tafelbilder vor Dürer. Munich, 1967: 1:117, no. 373.

1981: Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du musée du Louvre. II: Italie, Espagne, Allemagne, Grand-Bretagne et divers. Paris, 1981: 32, repro.

1999: Associated Press. "France Returns Art Plundered from Jews by Nazis in WWII." Las Vegas Review-Journal (December 15, 1999): 13-A, repro.

2000: Auer, James. "Fifteenth-century Masterpiece May Go Home After Sixty-Year Odyssey." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (April 2, 2000): E1, E7, color repro.

2000: Hughes, Robert. "Of 'Psycho' Beds and Other Stellar Sales." Wall Street Journal 235, no. 95 (May 12, 2000): W16, color repro.

2004: Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 68-69, no. 50, color repro.

2009: Mack, Rosamund E. "When Armor Was Art: Exploring Images of Armor in the National Gallery of Art Collections." Washington, 1990: color repro.

2016: Warner-Johnson, Tim, and Jeremy Howard, eds. Colnaghi: Past, Present and Future: An Anthology. London, 2016: 178-179, color fig. 3; 184-185, color plate 1; 212-213, color repro.