Tempelskatten. Peter finder mønten i fiskens gab

Jordaens packs a boat and a riverbank with peasants, merchants and crying children — figures of every age and trade, pressing on the eye from the moment the half-naked sailor at the centre turns his back and draws us in. The passengers are wholly taken up with their own business, from the thoughtful farmer stooped over his cow to the child whose apple has just dropped into the current — and so they never notice the scene playing out on the bank at the right, where, in fulfilment of Christ’s prophecy, the apostle Peter has found a coin in the mouth of a fish: the money with which the temple tax will be paid, and the painting’s title (Matthew 17:24-27). The canvas is enormous, close to five metres across, and was sewn together out of eight pieces of unequal size. It may have been made for the town hall of Antwerp, whose long hall is the sight Joachim von Sandrart described in 1675 when he praised the great “ferry boat of Antwerp”; in the later eighteenth century it belonged to the de Geer family, who carried it from Amsterdam to their estate at Finspång in Sweden, and in 1912 the landowner Axel Ekman sold it to the museum. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).