The Apostles Thomas and James the Greater,
oil on panel, each 117.5 x 54.5 cm, framed (2)

Provenance:
sale, Fischer, Lucerne, 23–26 August 1939, lot 1636 (as Master of the Darmstadt Passion)

We are grateful to Dr. Bernd Konrad for his certificate and for compiling this catalogue entry.

Both panels were sold by Fischer in Lucerne in 1939 together with a third panel, showing an angel holding a sceptre in his hand. According to a certificate written by Antonio Morassi, to which Fischer subscribed, the panels were offered for sale as works by the Master of the Darmstadt Passion. For comparison, reference was made to panels by this master in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin (today’s Picture Gallery of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; inv. no. 1205/06). Thanks to the inventory numbers mentioned in the auction catalogue, these panels can be identified as wings for the Altar from Bad Orb. Its exterior wings, showing a Madonna and the Holy Trinity, seem to have prompted Morassi’s comparison. Alfred Stange does not list the present works under the name of this master, nor do they appear anywhere else in his publication.

The present panels seem closer to the Swabian painting style practiced around 1480. The head of the angel leads us to the exterior view of the retable at Ehningen, commissioned by Mechthild of Germany at the Württemberg court (most recently discussed by E. Wiemann, in: Hans Holbein d. Ä. – Die Graue Passion in ihrer Zeit, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 2010/11, pp. 334ff., no. 100; Anna Moraht-Fromm, in: Van Eyck bis Dürer, Altniederländische Malerei und die Malerei in Mitteleuropa 1430–1530, Groeninge Museum Brügge 2010/11, ed. by Till-Holger Borchert, pp. 306/7, no. 141). This work is by the hand of a Swabian master that was made under the impact of Early Netherlandish painting, such as that of Aelbert and Dirk Bouts, where the figures are likewise placed on tiled floors. The wings of a Marian altar from the Abbey of Lichtenthal near Baden-Baden, which dates from 1489, also give rise to the assumption that the present panels are associated with the Swabian painting school. Considered for a time as either from the Upper Rhine (D. Lüdke, in: Spätmittelalter am Oberrhein, Maler und Werkstätten 1450–1525, Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 2003, pp. 257ff., no. 104) or from Swabia (A.Moraht Fromm, Das Erbe der Markgrafen, Die Sammlung deutscher Malerei 1350–1550 in Karlsruhe, Ostfildern, 2013, p. 524, n. 202), this altarpiece was recently identified by Anna Moraht-Fromm (ibid., pp. 520ff.) as a work from the circle of Hans Schüchlin, whose workshop was in Ulm. (see fig. 1, 2 showing two IR-images of the panel, proving the quality of the underdrawing).

additional picture:
Infrared images of this pair of paintings