Last Rites

In the Austrian countryside of the 1840s, a priest bringing the sacrament to someone dying went as a small procession. A server with a light and a little bell walked ahead, and anyone who heard it knelt as the host passed. Here the priest has arrived at a wine-press house. In surplice and gold stole, he holds the veiled vessel with the sacrament and faces a doorway into a dark room, where a boy is already stepping through.

The relatives kneel on the stone floor. A young woman looks upward, an old man bends over her with one finger raised, and a small girl presses her palms together. From 1877 the panel passed between private owners in Vienna, among them Baroness Sina, of the banking family, and the Counts Wimpffen. It reached the Belvedere only in 2023, as a bequest.