Saint Andrew

When this canvas was sold in Berlin in 1911, from the estate of a Budapest collector, the sale catalogue called the old man Saint Peter. Forty years later a New York dealer's stock book entered him as an old fisherman. Both names suit a man who lived by his nets, and so does the one the museum uses, Saint Andrew, Peter's brother, a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee before he followed Christ. The museum dates the picture to 1641 and lists it as attributed to Ribera, close to his hand but short of certain. The open question is its middle years. Around 1926 it was bought by Leo Goldberger, a Jewish industrialist in Budapest. In 1944 he was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp, and he died of starvation shortly after the camp was liberated in 1945. The contents of his home, his art collection with them, were looted. How the painting reached Paris, where the New York firm Knoedler acquired it in 1951, is not known. It came to Boston as a gift in 1991, and the museum says its research continues, in contact with the Goldberger heirs.