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Christ Healing the Sick by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich

Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich · 1742-01-01

This is 'Christ Healing the Sick' by Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, painted in 1742 and now held at the Hermitage Museum. It looks like a Rembrandt because it was designed to. Dietrich was famous for imitating the Dutch masters, but what makes his story fascinating is that an empress valued the imitation enough to make it imperial property.

Look first at the light. Dietrich places a brilliant white Christ against a dark, crumbling wall and a dense crowd. The single reaching hand nearly touches the prone figure on the stretcher below, and the whole scene hangs on that small gap between divine hand and human need. Then find the dog in the lower left corner, sleeping through the miracle. Dietrich borrowed that touch directly from Flemish genre scenes, grounding a supernatural event in the everyday.

Dietrich was a Saxon court painter who never developed a signature style of his own. Instead he became a virtuoso mimic of Rembrandt, Teniers, and other Dutch and Flemish artists. In the 1760s Catherine the Great acquired a huge collection of his work for the Hermitage, paying prices that recognized Dietrich as a master, chameleon or not. He died in 1774 as a respected painter and art administrator in Dresden.

The dog napping through a miracle might be Dietrich's quiet joke about perspective: the divine and the mundane share the same frame, and both are worth a patron's gold.

Details

He never found his own style. He painted in everyone else's.
He never found his own style. He painted in everyone else's.
But the price tells a different story.
But the price tells a different story.
In the 1760s, Catherine the Great bought the entire Dietrich collection.
In the 1760s, Catherine the Great bought the entire Dietrich collection.
A single room at the Hermitage. Paid for by an empress.
A single room at the Hermitage. Paid for by an empress.
Now look at the dog.
Now look at the dog.
Transcript

You'd swear this was a lost Rembrandt. 1742. A German painter named Dietrich made it. He never found his own style. He painted in everyone else's. But the price tells a different story. In the 1760s, Catherine the Great bought the entire Dietrich collection. A single room at the Hermitage. Paid for by an empress. Now look at the dog. While a biblical miracle happens, a dog naps through it.