The Assumption of the Virgin

This canvas is a copy of a famous Venetian altarpiece. The original is the Assumption Tintoretto painted in the 1550s for a church in Venice, a tall altarpiece that hangs today in the church of the Gesuiti. Here the whole composition, the Virgin rising on clouds above the apostles, is brought down to less than 70 centimetres high by a painter whose name was not recorded. By 1882 it belonged to Thomas Gold Appleton, a Boston writer known for his wit and credited with the line that good Americans, when they die, go to Paris. Appleton was among the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, which opened in 1876 and in its first years leaned heavily on plaster casts to show Bostonians the art of Europe, and painted copies like this one could do the same for pictures that would never leave Venice. Appleton died in 1884 and left it to the museum in his will.