The Communion of the Apostles

On 2 December 1881 Clara Thies wrote to Boston from Dresden about a painting she had owned for more than 30 years. It had hung, she explained, in the private gallery of a Bohemian baron. Shortly before the revolution of 1848 the young baron decided to turn the pictures he had inherited from his father into money and sent them to Dresden to be sold, and she bought this one with the help of a friend who was an art critic. The museum thinks the collection may have been that of Franz von Sternberg-Manderscheid, a Prague collector whose pictures were dispersed in a series of Dresden sales between 1840 and 1847.

Clara Thies was born a Crowninshield in Boston and married a German, Louis Thies. In 1850 the canvas was shown at an exhibition in Albany, New York, and in 1882 she gave it to the museum.

It is a big picture, almost two metres high and more than three wide. Christ has stepped away from the supper table and places the bread in the mouth of an old apostle kneeling with his hands joined, while the others crowd round to wait their turn.