Antoon van Dyck (1599–1641), The Descent of the Holy Spirit, 1618–1620, Oil on canvas, 265 × 221 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam
This early work by van Dyck was created in Peter Paul Rubens’s studio for the Bridgettine Cloister of Hoboken near Antwerp. In 1618 van Dyck became a master of the Antwerp Guild at the age of just nineteen and, almost simultaneously, entered Rubens’s workshop as an assistant, where he spent the next two years. The Pentecost belongs to a group of three paintings produced during this period, all of which demonstrate the close stylistic dialogue between master and pupil.
By 1660 the cycle had been moved to the Abbey of Ter Duinen in Bruges, where it remained until 1755. That year Frederick II of Prussia purchased the paintings, which from 1764 onwards were housed in a variety of royal residences. During the Napoleonic Wars the French army seized the Pentecost, transferring it first to the Musée Napoléon in Paris (1806–1809) and then to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. Following the Congress of Vienna it was returned to the Prussian king in 1815. Over the following century it was displayed in several locations, including the Bildergalerie at Sanssouci, the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, and Schloss Rheinsberg.
The other two paintings from the original group, the Crowning with Thorns and the Two Johns (Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist), disappeared in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Pentecost itself was removed from Rheinsberg in July 1945 by Soviet forces and transferred to the Hermitage in Leningrad. It was eventually restituted to East Germany in 1959 and reinstated in the Bildergalerie Sanssouci, where it remains today as a central witness to van Dyck’s beginnings under Rubens and to the turbulent movements of European collections in the modern era.