Saint Augustine

An Augustinian prior in Prague, Jan Baptista Svitavsky of Bochov, ordered two altarpieces for his church directly from Antwerp, from the busiest painter in Europe. The first, a martyrdom of Saint Thomas, arrived in 1637. This one followed in 1639, the year before Rubens died. Bohemia had been forcibly recatholicised after the defeat of the Protestant estates in 1620, and the Thirty Years' War still had nine years to run. The subject is a medieval legend rather than anything Augustine wrote. Walking on the shore while trying to think his way through the Trinity, he comes on a child pouring seawater into a hole in the sand, and is told the sea will be emptied first. The canvas has hung in the National Gallery in Prague since 1891. The Augustinian order recovered legal ownership of it in the 2010s, and it stayed where it was.