Summary

Sculpture, oak wood; The Prophet Jesse; Flanders, Antwerp; c. 1500-1520. A sleeping figure of Jesse, the Biblical father of David and thus the ancestor of Jesus Christ. The tree growing from Jesse’s chest represents the symbolic tree that leads over generations to Christ, but also refers to the wood of the Cross, upon which the Saviour would be crucified. The figure forms the lower part of a Tree of Jesse, a popular iconography in Northern Europe in the decades around 1500. In its complete form, the tree emerging from Jesse would rise upwards, its branches populated with small images of the Prophets and ancestors of Christ, before culminating at the top in a representation of the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ. It has long been assumed that this detached relief originally belonged to the large Antwerp altarpiece in the Chapel at Oxburgh Hall. However, it differs in style from the carvings on the altarpiece and is earlier in date. After having been sold from Oxburgh Hall in 1951, it was fortunately acquired back for the house in 2004.

Full description

Painted and gilded oak carved relief panel, depicting the Old Testament patriarch Jesse. Flemish, Antwerp, early 16th-century. Jesse is seated on a bench beneath a tented canopy, asleep and with his head leaning on his left hand. The tree emerges from out of his chest, winding upwards and out of the panel, to Jesse’s left. The hand mark for Antwerp stamped into the surface in the centre of the canopy. On the back an old handwritten label describing the subject, attribution and the hand mark. The sculpture is in a fragile condition, with the decorative gesso and paint layers flaking and lifting, and the wood weakened from past woodworm damage. The lower end of the proper right armrest has a split and there is a split in the proper right bottom corner. The proper right branch of the tree is missing, as well as the tip of the proper left branch. This is a detached panel from a representation of the Tree of Jesse, an iconography based on Old Testament prophecies that enjoyed considerable popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in northern Europe. Jesse was the father of King David in the Old Testament. The concept of his tree is based on a prophecy in the Old Testament Book of the Prophet Isaiah (Chapter 11, verses 1-2): ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.’ This passage was interpreted by medieval theologians as a genealogical tree in the form of a vigorous plant with many branches and, at the top, the figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ. The Tree was intended to demonstrate to worshippers how Christ, the flower, would be born of the Virgin Mary, the shoot, who was in turn descended from the Jewish patriarch Jesse, the father of King David. The Tree was generally depicted in the form of a family tree, the ascending branches populated with small images of the ancestors of Christ, including King David and the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, going back to Jesse over sometimes as many as 42 generations. Jesse Trees are found as manuscript illuminations and in stained glass, but they also quite frequently featured in sculptural compositions, the sinuous branches of the Tree reflecting well late Gothic taste in design. One of the greatest representations of Jesse, indeed one of the finest surviving wood sculptures in Britain from before the Reformation, is the large late fifteenth-century reclining figure in St. Mary’s Church Abergavenny, all that remains from what must have been a very large Tree of Jesse. As an iconography, the Tree of Jesse is unfamiliar to most modern audiences, but the idea of the Root of Jesse is still remembered to this day at Advent and Christmas, in the words of the popular fifteenth-century carol that begins: ‘There is a flower sprung of a tree / The root thereof is called Jesse / A flower of price / There is none such in Paradise !’ The Tree of Jesse iconography became especially popular in Antwerp in the early years of the sixteenth century (Green 2019, p. 141-63); more than 20% of surviving Antwerp carved altarpieces contain some kind of representation of the Tree of Jesse (as against no occurrences in altarpieces made in the same period in another major centre for wood sculpture, Brussels). In part, this was because the main subject of the majority of known Antwerp altarpieces is the Passion of Christ, an iconography with which the Tree of Jesse was closely associated. In most Antwerp altarpieces, the Crucifixion was invariably depicted in the central compartment, which was almost always taller than those on either side. Just such an arrangement can be seen in the Oxburgh Altarpiece (NT 1209874). The visual connection between the Tree of Jesse and the sufferings of Christ on the Cross had its roots in the writings of the Italian monk and theologian Peter Damian (1007-1072), who explained in his homily De exaltatione Sanctae Crucis [‘On the exaltation of the Holy Cross’] that ‘Out of the rod (virga) of Jesse we came to the ‘rod’ of the Cross, and the beginning of redemption was its conclusion.’ This is why in these altarpieces the figure of Jesse is almost always placed below the Crucifixion scene and why, in a work such as the Oxburgh Altarpiece, the ‘branches’ of the tree run up the sides and around the top of the scene of the Crucifixion. In the Oxburgh Altarpiece, the two branches unite at the centre of the curving top in a small figure of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child. In Antwerp altarpieces featuring the Tree of Jesse, the compartment below the Crucifixion scene would normally have held a figure of Jesse. The Oxburgh altarpiece must originally have had a figure of Jesse in the compartment below the Crucifixion, but this was lost when this compartment was adapted to create a space to hold a relic, or some other holy object. The probable original configuration would have been similar to the Tree of Jesse scene in the Antwerp ‘Altarpiece of the Martyrs’ in the Cathedral Church of St Victor in Xanten, Germany, dated 1525 (Green 2019, pp. 142-43, fig. 5.1). This shows, within a compartment with a sloping floor, the figure of Jesse seated under a similar canopy to the Oxburgh figure, and before him on each side two prophets holding scrolls. There is a similar configuration in the Antwerp altarpiece on the north side of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Straelen, Germany. In both cases, the upper branches of the tree emerge from just above the group of figures shown standing below the scene of the Crucifixion, as they do in the Oxburgh altarpiece. In another Antwerp altarpiece, the retable of c. 1510-30 from Pailhe, now in the Museum of Art and History in Brussels (Inv. 425; Dervaux-van Ussel 1977, pp. 11-12, Pls. 18-19), there is a very similar scene in the compartment below the Crucifixion. Here, however, the Tree is severely truncated, depicted entirely within the space of the compartment and with a very reduced number of Prophets in the branches. The carving of the Oxburgh figure of Jesse is of good quality, the way in which the roots of the tree appear to be like fingers digging into his stomach being especially effective. It has been claimed that this carving was made for the Oxburgh Altarpiece. Although it is possible that it was added to the altarpiece at some later date and so was present when the ensemble arrived at Oxburgh, it almost certainly was not originally made for it. Quite apart from the lack of an obvious place for it on the altarpiece as it is today, this Jesse seems to be earlier and more Gothic in style, whilst the gilding and painting are also very different to that of the Oxburgh Altarpiece figures, even taking account of their repainting. Other detached figures of Jesse survive, such as one in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, dated c. 1520 (Nieuwdorp 1993, no. 25). It is much more likely that the Oxburgh Jesse figure was one of the numerous carvings that Sir Henry Paston-Bedingfeld, 6th Baronet (1800-1862) and his wife Margaret (1807-1887) acquired in the 1830s in Brussels, Bruges and elsewhere in the Low Countries. In early 1836, when the couple were living in Bruges, Margaret wrote that ‘Here then we began to lead the life of hermits in good earnest, devoting all our money to making purchases for Oxburgh. We were fortunate enough to find a beautiful altar &c for our new Chapel (which Henry arranged out of a Chapelle Gothique) & several other pieces of carving, Cabinets &c. Pere Augustine, the Superior of the Carmes, presented us with various things, amongst others, a well carved Madonna &c in oak’ (Journal of Margaret Paston-Bedingfeld, 1829-1839, NT 1211847, fols. 124-25). Fragments from Trees of Jesse may be found elsewhere at Oxburgh, applied to the sides of the Tabernacle at the centre of the Oxburgh altarpiece, and running up each side of the composite wooden assemblage that sits above the fireplace in the Library (NT 1209845). The figure of Jesse is however first certainly recorded only when it was sold from the house in 1951. At this time it was a detached independent piece of carving, on display in the King’s Room at Oxburgh Hall. It was auctioned at the Oxburgh sale on 31 Oct.-1 Nov. 1951, in lot 31, as one of “6 pieces of carving, various” from the King’s Room. The lot was bought by the Reverend Mr Hall Sr and/or his son, Bryan Hall; it then featured in Bryan Hall’s sale held by Bonhams at his home the Old Rectory, Banningham, 22-24 March 2004, lot 1146, at which it was bought back by the National Trust for Oxburgh. Jeremy Warren April 2025