Wentworth Canning Blackett Beaumont, 1st viscount and 2nd baron Allendale

1860 - 1923

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Three scenes showing the same person, Saint Anthony, are spaced along a path that winds from the lower right corner and around hills and trees into the distance in this vertical painting. In all three scenes, Saint Anthony has pale skin, a long white beard, and a halo framing a fringe of white hair around a balding head. He is barefoot and wears a black monk’s robe, and wears or carries a coral-pink cloak. Closest to us, in front of the mouth of a dark cave, Saint Anthony embraces a light-skinned, bearded man with long, curly blond hair. That man wears cream-white robes and also has a halo. Two walking sticks lie on the ground at their feet. The pebble-lined path disappears between stylized trees painted with smooth dark brown trunks and canopies created with pine and spring-green dots over a ground of forest green. To our right and farther along the path as it rises along the ridge of a hill, Saint Anthony meets a centaur, which has the torso and head of a man and the body and legs of a horse. The centaur holds a palm frond, and Saint Anthony raises one hand. On the opposite side of the hill, in the distance to our left, Saint Anthony walks along the path with a walking stick, and his pink robe hangs over a second long stick slung over his shoulder. Trees running along the background come nearly to the top of the panel, but a sliver of sky is painted gold, and the top edge is punched or embossed with a decorative pattern. Pale red shapes beyond the trees could be a building, perhaps a church, rising in the distance.
Master of the Osservanza, Sano di Pietro, The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul, c. 1430/1435, tempera on poplar panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.293

The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul

Master of the Osservanza, Sano di Pietro · c. 1430/1435 · tempera on poplar panel ·  Accession ID  1939.1.293

Four people with pale skin are gathered to our right in a landscape, their heads bowed down toward an infant who lies on a white cloth on the ground in this horizontal painting. The nude baby has a rounded belly, chubby limbs, and short blond hair. To our right and near the edge of the panel, a woman kneels with her hands in prayer, looking toward the baby so she faces our left in profile. She wears a lapis-blue robe over a rose-pink dress, and a white cloth covers her head and shoulders. Behind her and to our left, a man with a white beard, wearing a golden yellow robe, sits or kneels next to a rock at the mouth of a cave cut into a rocky outcropping that extends off the top of the composition. To the left of the baby and at the center of the foreground, a pair of men wear tattered clothing and hold shepherd’s staffs. The man closer to us kneels with his hands pressed together in prayer as the man behind him bends his knee as if to kneel. The landscape recedes deep into the distance on the left half of the painting with a winding river, houses and other buildings, grassy hills, and mountains beneath a blue sky. A small winged angel wearing white looks down on the scene from the upper left corner.
Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1505/1510, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.289

The Adoration of the Shepherds

Giorgione · 1505/1510 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1939.1.289