Attributed to Tobias Verhaecht

At the center of this detailed and minutely rendered landscape is the figure of Saint John the Evangelist, the red of his costume and the warmth of the rocks around him serving to compliment the blues of the choppy waters and the distant landscape beyond. He stands on the island of Patmos, where he was sent into exile and where he had a number of visions that he later recorded in his Book of Revelation. The particular vision recorded in this panel is recorded in Revelation 12: 1, 3-5: 

'And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars...And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth...

Dr. Luuk Pijl, to whom we are grateful, has tentatively suggested an attribution for this panel to the Flemish artist Tobias Verhaecht on the basis of digital photographs. Indeed, the panel does share some compositional similarities with a panel of the same subject by Verhaecht, with figures by Gillis Coignet, today in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg.¹ 

Tobias Verhaecht was largely active in Antwerp in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. His landscapes arose from the tradition of the so-called “world landscape” first developed by Joachim Patinir and Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the first half of the 16^th century and further championed later in the century by artists like Hans Bol. In the present work, there are some visual elements that harken back to these earlier masters. For example, the ship at left follows a print by Pieter Bruegel the Elder,² and the figure of Saint John can be closely compared to that found in a tüchlein of 1564 by Hans Bol, today in the Mauritshuis, the Hague.³  

1.  Inv. no. ГЭ-8694, oil on panel, 133 by 191.5 cm. 

2.  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 28.4(7), engraving, circa 1561-65. 

3.  Inv. no. 1043, watercolor on canvas, 50.5 by 85.5 cm.