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Two scenes showing monks wearing black hoods and robes take place on this vertical panel painting. The left half is framed by a white stone arch supported on a pillar, which runs down the middle of the composition. Under the arch, a clean-shaven man sits with his body angled to our right. A book is open on his lap, and he holds up his left hand, to our right. He braces a gold-tipped long staff with his other hand, and a gold halo frames his lined face. His hood is down, and he wears a tall, brimless black cap. He sits in a room with a wood floor, wood ceiling, and a bench under an open window on the far wall. The shutters are pulled back to show a continuation of the background landscape on the right half. There, one monk holds another, who is smaller in scale, around the chest as the latter floats or stands in a white body of water. The person in the water holds a bucket limply by his side and looks at us. The water winds back to low, green hills and a pink stone building with white trim along the right edge of the painting. A church with ivory-white walls and a slate-blue roof is situated slightly farther back, and it continues to be visible through the windows. The narrow strip of white sky in the top right corner of the painting is lined along the top edge with aquamarine blue.
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Two scenes showing monks wearing black hoods and robes take place on this vertical panel painting. The left half is framed by a white stone arch supported on a pillar, which runs down the middle of the composition. Under the arch, a clean-shaven man sits with his body angled to our right. A book is open on his lap, and he holds up his left hand, to our right. He braces a gold-tipped long staff with his other hand, and a gold halo frames his lined face. His hood is down, and he wears a tall, brimless black cap. He sits in a room with a wood floor, wood ceiling, and a bench under an open window on the far wall. The shutters are pulled back to show a continuation of the background landscape on the right half. There, one monk holds another, who is smaller in scale, around the chest as the latter floats or stands in a white body of water. The person in the water holds a bucket limply by his side and looks at us. The water winds back to low, green hills and a pink stone building with white trim along the right edge of the painting. A church with ivory-white walls and a slate-blue roof is situated slightly farther back, and it continues to be visible through the windows. The narrow strip of white sky in the top right corner of the painting is lined along the top edge with aquamarine blue.

National Gallery of Art · Painting

A Miracle of Saint Benedict

French 15th Century

Date
c. 1480
Medium
oil on oak
Dimensions
painted surface: 91.5 x 78 cm (36 x 30 11/16 in.) original panel: 94 x 79.4 cm (37 x 31 1/4 in.) framed: 109.5 x 95.7 x 7.6 cm (43 1/8 x 37 11/16 x 3 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
1952.5.45
Credit line
Samuel H. Kress Collection
Time span
1401 to 1500
Department
CNE-R
Original NGA record Wikidata

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • French
  • French Paintings of the Fifteenth through Eighteenth Century
  • saints
  • religious
  • Renaissance
  • Benedict
Provenance

Eugene Leopold Garbaty [1885-1966], Berlin and New York, by 1931;[1] (Paul Drey, New York); sold 1948 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1952 to NGA. [1] Neither Friedrich Winkler's certificate of 6 February 1931 (Kress collection records in NGA curatorial files) nor Winkler, "Simon Marmion," _Pantheon_ 13 (1934): 70, identifies or locates the painting's owner. However, Grete Ring, _A Century of French Painting 1400-1500_, London, 1949: 222, no. 193 (who was apparently unaware of the 1948 sale to the Kress Foundation), gives the owner as Garbaty in New York and indicates that the collection was once in Berlin, so it is likely Garbaty was also the owner in the 1930s. His collection was probably housed at the Schloss Altdöbern, a property south of Berlin owned before World War II by the family. According to his obituary (_New York Times_, 8 September 1966: 47), Garbaty developed one of the leading tobacco businesses in Germany and was an art collector before his Jewish family was forced to flee the country in 1938/1939. He brought some of the collection with him. He lent several paintings to the art exhibition at the 1939 New York World's Fair (and its subsequent U.S. tour), and the dealer Georges Seligmann listed more than a dozen paintings (including _A Miracle of Saint Benedict_) in a January 1945 report on Garbaty's collection (Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Seligmann Papers, box 247, copy in NGA curatorial files). [2] See The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/63.

NGA object ID 41658. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.