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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

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 3

Medium

tempera on poplar panel

Dimensions

painted surface: 46.5 x 33.4 cm (18 5/16 x 13 1/8 in.)
overall: 47 x 33.6 cm (18 1/2 x 13 1/4 in.)

framed: 61.6 x 125.4 x 7.6 cm (24 1/4 x 49 3/8 x 3 in.)

Credit Line

Samuel H. Kress Collection

Accession Number

1939.1.293

Artists / Makers

Master of the Osservanza (painter) Sienese, active late 1420s - early 1440s

Sano di Pietro (painter) Sienese, 1405 - 1481

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Provenance

Granville Edward Harcourt Vernon [1816-1861], Grove Hall, Nottinghamshire; by inheritance to his wife, Lady Selina Vernon [later Lady Hervey], Grove Hall, Nottinghamshire;[1] (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 17-18 June 1864, 2nd day, no. 270, as Two Monks embracing at the Foot of a Mountain by P. Laurenti); purchased by Anthony;[2] Wentworth Blackett Beaumont, 1st baron Allendale [1829-1907], London; by inheritance to his son, Wentworth Canning Blackett Beaumont, 1st viscount and 2nd baron Allendale [1860-1923], London; by inheritance to his son, Wentworth Henry Canning Beaumont, 2nd viscount and 3rd baron Allendale [1890-1956], London;[3] sold 1937 to (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London, New York, and Paris); sold June 1938 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[4] gift 1939 to NGA.

[1] See Ellis Waterhouse, "Sassetta and the Legend of St. Anthony Abbot," The Burlington Magazine (September 1931): 113, note 7; and a letter of 15 December 1964 from Ellis Waterhouse to the Kress Foundation (copy in NGA curatorial files), discussed in Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:319 n. 2. According to Algernon Graves (A Century of Loan Exhibitions, 1813-1912, 5 vols., London, 1913-1915: 1:23, 439; 2:768, 883; 3:995, 1247), Harcourt Vernon allowed various early Italian pictures in his collection to be exhibited as early as 1857, at the Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester.

[2] Shapley 1979, 1:319. According to Ellis Waterhouse's 1964 letter (see note 1), the painting "was bought by the dealer Anthony for 1.2 Pounds. It was probably bought by W.B. Beaumont...soon after."

[3] Ellis Waterhouse, in a letter of 4 March 1965 (in NGA curatorial files) to Fern Rusk Shapley, noted that he had "discovered" the painting "in a bathroom" on 29 October 1930. He adds that "the picture was never, I fancy, in Northumberland [Bretton Hall, Viscount Allendale's country estate], but in London, at 144 Piccadilly..." The year of the panel's acquisition by Duveen is given in the same letter.

[4] The Duveen Brothers letter confirming the sale of eight paintings, including NGA 1939.1.293, is dated 21 June 1938; the provenance is given as "Lord Allendale" (copy in NGA curatorial files; Box 474, Folder 5, Duveen Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2243.

Associated Names

Allendale, Wentworth Blackett Beaumont, 1st baron
Allendale, Wentworth Canning Blackett Beaumont, 1st viscount and 2nd baron
Allendale, Wentworth Henry Canning Beaumont, 2nd viscount and 3rd baron
Anthony
Christie, Manson & Woods, Ltd.
Duveen Brothers, Inc.
Kress Foundation, Samuel H.
Vernon, Granville Edward Harcourt
Vernon, Selina, Lady

Exhibition History

1930: Catalogue of a Collection of Pictures, Furniture, and Other Objects of Art, Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, 1930-1931, no. 19.

1988: Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420-1500, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988-1989, no. 10g, repro., as The Journey and Meeting of Saint Anthony with Saint Paul the Hermit by the Master of the Osservanza.

2010: Da Jacopo della Quercia a Donatello. Le Arti a Siena nel Primo Rinascimento, Complesso Museale Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, 2010, no. C.34g, repro.

Bibliography

1931: Waterhouse, Ellis K. "Sassetta and the Legend of St. Anthony Abbot." The Burlington Magazine 59 (September 1931): 108-113, plate II-C.

1941: Duveen Brothers. Duveen Pictures in Public Collections of America. New York, 1941: nos. 33-35, repros., as by Stefano di Giovanni Sassetta.

1941: Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 178-179, no. 404, as by Sassetta.

1942: Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 247, repro. 185, as by Sassetta.

1944: Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. Masterpieces of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1944: 32, color repro., as by Sassetta.

1944: Frankfurter, Alfred M. The Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1944: 25, repro., as by Sassetta.

1945: Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 40, repro.

1946: Frankfurter, Alfred M. Supplement to the Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1946: 26, repro., as by Sassetta

1956: Pope-Hennessy, John. "Rethinking Sassetta." The Burlington Magazine98 (October 1956): 366, 368, fig. 29.

1956: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. New York, 1956: 16, repro., as by Sassetta.

1959: Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 41, repro., as by Sassetta.

1961: Walker, John, Guy Emerson, and Charles Seymour. Art Treasures for America: An Anthology of Paintings & Sculpture in the Samuel H. Kress Collection. London, 1961: 18-23, color repro. pl. 18, fig. 17.

1963: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 72, repro., as by Sassetta.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 120, as by Sassetta and Assistant.

1966: Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. A Pageant of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. 2 vols. New York, 1966: 1:12, color repro.

1966: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 141, fig. 380-381.

1968: Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools. 3 vols. London, 1968: 1:254.

1968: Gandolfo, Giampaolo et al. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Great Museums of the World. New York, 1968: 22-23, color repro.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 107, repro., as by Sassetta and Assistant.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 318, repro., as by Sassetta and Assistant.

1979: Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1979: 1:319-323; 2:pl. 230, 230A,B, as Master of the Osservanza Triptych.

1984: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 78, no. 26, color repro.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 368, repro.

1993: Gagliardi, Jacques. La conquête de la peinture: L’Europe des ateliers du XIIIe au XVe siècle. Paris, 1993: 402.

1997: Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries, New Haven & London, 1997, p. 118, repro.

2003: Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al. Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003: 481-495, color repro., as by Master of the Osservanza (Sano di Pietro).

2012: Bellosi, Luciano. "Considerazioni introduttive al problema dell'identificazione tra il "Maestro dell'Osservanza" e Sano di Pietro." In Gabriele Fattorini et. al., eds. Sano di Pietro: Qualità, devozione e pratica nella pittura senese del Quattrocento. Giornate di studio nel sesto centenario della nascita. Siena 5 dicembre 2005 – Asciano 6 dicembre 2005. Milan, 2012: 44.

2012: De Marchi, Andrea. "Sano di Pietro prima della Pala dei Gesuati e il "Maestro dell'Osservanza": aporie di una doppia identità." In Gabriele Fattorini et. al., eds. Sano di Pietro: Qualità, devozione e pratica nella pittura senese del Quattrocento. Giornate di studio nel sesto centenario della nascita. Siena 5 dicembre 2005 – Asciano 6 dicembre 2005. Milan, 2012: 62-65, figs. 37-38.