Executed sometime in the 1380s or 1390s by a close associate of the Master of the
Třeboň Altarpiece, this impressive panel is a rare work created at the royal court in Prague and a significant re-discovery for the corpus of early Bohemian painting. It has emerged from an American collection, descendants of the celebrated Czech industrialist and collector Jindřich Waldes, who died in Havana fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.

The distinctive visual tradition of the Bohemian school first began to take shape in the middle of the fourteenth century after Charles IV—King of Bohemia and later Holy Roman Emperor—established Prague as a major artistic center. The influx of foreign artists and the importation of significant works of art from across Europe had a profound influence on the development of a local pictorial style. Early Italian paintings, especially those by Sienese painters and Tommaso da Modena (who worked at Charles IV’s court), had a considerable impact on the first generation of Bohemian painters. Although this influence is still felt in the brilliant gold ground and the delicate tooling of the present work, the author of this painting appears to be responding more to the paintings of his predecessors in Prague than to foreign influences.

This Resurrection of Christ employs a compositional format that was popular throughout the late medieval period but was particularly pervasive in Bohemian painting. Christ is shown sitting atop a pink marble sarcophagus, stepping down onto the ground with one bare foot. He blesses the viewer with his right hand, while in his left he holds a triumphal cross with a fluttering banner, symbolizing his victory over death. Several Roman soldiers doze at the base of the tomb, except for one grotesque figure, who, beginning to wake, shields his eyes from the light and looks on with a face of bewilderment as Christ emerges from his tomb. Christ is wrapped in a striking red robe with a blue interior lining, the colors of which vary subtly in the changing light. He stands out prominently against the gold backdrop, which is interrupted only by the abstractly rendered landscape and trees on either side of him.

The soldiers’ armor is rendered in exacting detail, the cool gray of the metal contrasting with the earth tones of the outer garments. The sleeping soldier set within a jumble of armor with neither face nor hands exposed, is covered with what appears to be a shield emblazoned with two flies on a white field, somewhat resembling a cartouche (Fig. 1). This may be a heraldic device of the altarpiece’s patron or it may signify evil, referencing either the Roman soldiers or death, over both of which Christ triumphs.

This painting formed part of the collection assembled by the Czech industrialist and founder of the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company, Jindřich Waldes, in the early twentieth century. As a collector he is best remembered for establishing the Waldes Museum in Prague to house his collection of buttons (totaling nearly 70,000 items), as well as for being the primary patron of the modernist painter František Kupka. Waldes was also an avid collector of older art, and he approached his collecting activity with the goal of creating an encyclopedic collection of Czech art from the medieval period through to the then-present day. At the conclusion of two decades of collecting, his inventory counted 2331 paintings and drawings, 4764 prints, and 162 sculptures. This collection, which constituted the Waldesova Obrazárna (Waldes Picture Gallery), was first displayed in Waldes’ home in Prague at 44 Americká Street and later at his newly built Villa Marie at 12 Koperníkova Street. This Resurrection of Christ retains its frame from the Waldes Picture Gallery, including its original plaque “173 / Česky malíř z konce 14 stol.” (“Czech painter from the end of the 14th century”) and Waldes’ collection label on the reverse.

The Resurrection of Christ was one of the most significant late medieval panel paintings in the Waldes Picture Gallery. It was part of a series of four paintings including a Flagellation of Christ, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and The Pentecost—constituting a Passion Cycle—that Waldes acquired in July 1918 (Figs. 2–5). This was an important moment in Waldes’ activity as a collector of early Czech painting. His purchase of this Passion Cycle came on the heels of his headline-making acquisition of an early Bohemian diptych at the sale of Richard von Kaufmann’s collection in Berlin in December 1917, the first medieval painting that he added to his collection. However, while the Waldes diptych has been well-documented and frequently commented on by scholars, the present painting and the other related panels have been absent from the literature on early Bohemian art and have remained unseen by scholars for almost a century.

The earliest notice of the Resurrection and the series to which it belongs was published in 1919 by Rudolf Kuchynka, the curator and administrator of the Waldes Picture Gallery. According to Kuchynka, the four paintings were originally two wings of an altarpiece (painted on the front and reverse) that were cut down and cradled, creating four distinct works. Although nothing further is known about the original complex, it is likely that these wings flanked a central image of the Crucifixion. Kuchynka compared these paintings to those of the Master of Vyšší Brod and the Master of the Třeboň Altarpiece, suggesting a date for these panels of around 1400.

A later date was suggested by Jaroslav Pešina who proposed that the Waldes panels were examples of “conscious archaism,” but his proposal has since been widely discounted. The dating of the series was more recently discussed by Ivo Hlobil in 2004. Focusing specifically on the Christ on the Mount of Olives and the Pentecost, Hlobil posits that those two paintings, but not the others, are by later hands, proposing a date for these in the 1440s. It may well be that the inner panels—the Flagellation and our Resurrection—and the outer panels—Christ on the Mount of Olives and the Pentecost—of the altarpiece were painted as much as fifty years apart. This accords well with Dr. Alexandra Suda’s recent dating of our Resurrection to the 1380s or 1390s (verbal communication, 28 August 2019). The author of our Resurrection is not at present identifiable with any of the known artistic personalities of early Bohemian panel painting. Suda has suggested that on stylistic grounds he must be close to the Master of the Třeboň Altarpiece and it is possible that our artist trained in that master’s evidently large workshop.

The fact that the Waldes Resurrection of Christ has been absent from the scholarly literature is largely explained by its transferal to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War. In the 1930s Jindřich Waldes sent his family to the United States—the Koh-i-noor Company had several factories and an extensive operation there—while he remained behind in Prague as a proud Czech patriot. He was arrested by the Gestapo in September 1939 and imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald because of his Jewish heritage. Waldes was released from the concentration camp in 1941 after his wife paid a ransom of 8 million Czech korunas to the Gestapo, but he died during his voyage from Europe to the United States. He had sent a portion of his art collection (including the present painting) to United States along with his family, while the balance remained in Prague only to be confiscated by the Nazi’s in 1941, deposited in the National Gallery of Prague, and eventually incorporated into the museum’s collections. Some of these works were restituted to the family in 1996.