# The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment > Jan van Eyck - ca. 1436-38 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/jan-van-eyck/van-eyck-crucifixion-and-last-judgment/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-09 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Jan van Eyck - **Date:** ca. 1436-38 - **Medium:** Oil on canvas, transferred from wood - **Dimensions:** Each 56.5 x 19.7 cm (22 1/4 x 7 2/3 in.) - **Object type:** Painting - **Period:** Netherlandish, fifteenth century - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary Two panels, each about the size of a forearm, holding between them a Crucifixion crowded with figures under a city and a Last Judgment split into heaven above and a hell held open by Death. They were bought in Spain in the 1840s by a Russian ambassador, transferred from wood to canvas in 1867, bequeathed to the Imperial Hermitage, and sold out of the Soviet Union in 1933 for foreign currency to pay for the first Five Year Plan. The Metropolitan Museum bought them through Knoedler; the sale was secret until The New York Times reported it on 4 November 1933.For a hundred and thirty years they were argued back and forth between Jan van Eyck, his brother Hubert, his sister Margaret, Petrus Christus, a pupil and the school. The Met's recent research reads them as the doors of a shrine made to hold a purportedly desecrated host in Brussels, and argues that the format objections dissolve once the function is understood. The frames, cut away in 1867 and kept, turned out to carry a vernacular Dutch text under modern gilding, and are the strongest evidence in the case. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **ca. 1436-38-before 1841** Unrecorded; a religious house in Spain `[unknown]` (gap) Four hundred years with no named owner. Passavant wrote in the Kunstblatt of 12 January 1841 that the panels were the wings of a triptych acquired at an auction at a monastery. The Met's own provenance records only that Tatishchev bought them from a convent near Madrid, with a question mark against the alternative that it was near Burgos. Which house, when it was suppressed and what stood between the two wings are all unknown. If the Met's 2022 argument is right and the shrine was made for the church of Saints Michael and Gudula in Brussels, then how the doors reached Spain is a further unanswered question. - **by 1841-1845** Dmitry Pavlovich Tatishchev, Vienna and St Petersburg `[documented]` (purchase) Russian ambassador to Spain, who bought the panels there as by Jan van Eyck. His attribution, made by a diplomat buying out of a suppressed religious house, is the one the museum has come back to after a century and a half of learned dissent. He bequeathed them to the Imperial Hermitage. - **1845-1917** The Imperial Hermitage, St Petersburg, under Nicholas I and his successors `[documented]` (bequest) Catalogued as no. 444. The panels were transferred from wood to canvas in 1867 while in the Hermitage, and the original integral frames were cut away and kept. Waagen's Hermitage catalogue of 1870 lists them at no. 444 and reassigns them from van Eyck to Petrus Christus. - **1917-1933** Hermitage Museum, Leningrad `[documented]` (nationalisation) The imperial collection became a state museum after the revolution. In February 1928 the Hermitage and the Russian Museum were ordered to list works worth at least two million roubles for export, to raise foreign currency for the first Five Year Plan. - **1933** Knoedler, New York `[documented]` (trade stock) Knoedler was the firm most used by Andrew Mellon and, with Colnaghi of London and the dealer Matthiesen, formed the consortium that handled the Soviet sales. About 250 paintings left the Hermitage in these years, and Jan van Eyck is named among the artists. - **1933-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Fletcher Fund, accession 33.92ab. The purchase was secret until The New York Times reported on 4 November 1933 that several Hermitage paintings had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum. The museum records that this work may not be lent. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - These panels have never been offered at public auction. Every transfer in the recorded chain was a purchase from a religious house, a bequest, a nationalisation or a government sale conducted through dealers. No hammer price exists for them and no price for the 1933 purchase is published in the sources consulted. For scale on the wider transaction: Andrew Mellon had acquired twenty-one Hermitage paintings for a total of USD 6,654,000 by the end of 1931, a figure that belongs to his purchases and not to this one. ## Open questions - Which Spanish religious house did Tatishchev buy the panels from? The Met's provenance offers a convent near Madrid, with Burgos as an alternative carried with a question mark. - How did the panels reach Spain? If they were made for a shrine in Brussels in the 1430s, the route to a Spanish convent is entirely unrecorded. - What stood between them? Diptych, triptych with a painted centre, triptych with a sculpted centre and doors of a reliquary shrine have all been argued, and the frames carry physical evidence of at least two of those arrangements at different periods. - Who is the woman in red with the black shawl in the lower right of the Crucifixion? Panofsky proposed the Erythrean Sibyl; a participatory portrait of Isabella of Portugal has also been suggested; the Met leaves it open. - Are the panels autograph throughout, or by van Eyck with workshop assistance? The Met notes both positions in the current literature. - What did the Metropolitan Museum pay Knoedler in 1933? No figure for this purchase appears in the sources consulted. - Why was the blue moon in the Crucifixion painted as a waning gibbous at midday, hours before the death the Gospel of Mark places at the third hour after noon? ## Sources - [1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object record 436282, Jan van Eyck, The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment, accession 33.92ab. Consulted for the tombstone, the catalogue entry, the technical notes, the frames section, the signatures and inscriptions, the full provenance, the exhibition history and the bibliography, which supplies Passavant 1841, Waagen 1870, Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1872, Schnaase 1879, Clement de Ris 1879, Justi 1887, Kaemmerer 1898, Tschudi 1898, Voll 1900, Seeck 1901, Peters 1968, Brand Philip 1971, Chatelet 1980, Belting and Eichberger 1983, Kemperdick and Lammertse 2012, Ainsworth 2017 and 2022, Scully and Centeno 2022 and Smith 2022. - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access API, object 436282. Consulted for isPublicDomain, primaryImage, the count of additional images, medium, dimensions, artist dates, accession number and credit line. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings'. Tertiary. Used for the February 1928 export order, the first Five Year Plan as the motive, the figure of about 250 paintings sold with Jan van Eyck among the artists named, Gulbenkian as the first foreign buyer from early 1930, the Matthiesen consortium with Colnaghi and Knoedler, Mellon's twenty-one pictures for USD 6,654,000 by the end of 1931 and the New York Times report of 4 November 1933 revealing the Metropolitan Museum's purchases. Replace with Robert Williams's Russian Art and American Money and with the Knoedler archive at the Getty Research Institute. - [4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access API, object 435896, Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian, and object 436794, Joos van Cleve, The Last Judgment. Consulted to verify open-access status and the tombstones of the two comparison plates. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.