Saint Philip Baptizes the Eunuch

Around 1748 Matthijs and Catharina Beuning, a couple on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, ordered this chimneypiece from Jacob de Wit for their main room. The room was also a meeting place. The Beunings belonged to the circle of the Moravian Brethren, a Protestant movement from Herrnhut in Saxony, and its Amsterdam congregation gathered here. The Moravians sent missionaries overseas, among other places to the Dutch colony of Suriname to preach to enslaved people, and the Rijksmuseum reads the subject in that light.

It is the story from the Acts of the Apostles in which Philip baptises the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia, a foreigner converted on the road. The treasurer bows at the water's edge, his retinue waiting behind with a camel, a parasol and horses, and at the right stands the gilded chariot in which he had been reading the prophet Isaiah. The house was demolished in 1896 to make way for the Raadhuisstraat.