Christ Preaching on the Sea of Galilee

In December 1949 two panels of almost the same size came up one after the other at an auction in New York, and the catalogue gave both to Herri met de Bles, an Antwerp painter of wide, fantastical landscapes. This one, the dealer who bought it later wrote, had belonged to a Belgian owner who sent it to New York just before the war and left it with the dealers there until he decided to sell. The other panel, a Road to Calvary, is now at Princeton and still carries the name of Bles. The Museum of Fine Arts bought this one a few months later, in 1950, and catalogues it today under Jan van Scorel of Utrecht.

The subject comes from the Gospel of Luke. A crowd presses so hard on Jesus at the lake shore that he steps into a fishing boat belonging to Simon, later the apostle Peter, asks him to push out a little, and teaches the people from the water. The boat lies to the left, the listeners fill the shore, and rocky country climbs away behind them. The panel carries no date, and the museum gives it none.