Kazanie z łodzi | Sermon from the boat

The painting, along with four other paintings, made up the decoration of the pulpit, which was located in the castle church in Szczecin until the mid-19th century. Three of them: "The Temptation of Christ", "Sermon in the Evangelical Church" and the featured "Sermon from a Boat" are in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin. Two other pieces: "Christ and the Unconverted Sinner", and "The Creation of Eve and Original Sin" were lost after the Second World War. The featured quarter shows a scene from the New Testament in which Christ preaches the parable of the sower from a boat. The crowd gathered on the shores of Lake Gennesareth (also known as Lake Galilee or Lake Tiberias) is listening to him. The scene's background extends across a vast landscape with a town depicted in the distance. The group of trees on the left is depicted with remarkable accuracy, while the author took a more schematic approach to portraying the figures. The foreground on the right is filled with a group of seated women with children on their laps. Behind them are men with various headgear and long robes thrown over their shoulders. The boat sermon theme was an important evangelical motif and was often depicted on pulpits, which were used for preaching the word of God themselves. The composition and technique of the artist who painted the pictures have been linked in the literature with the Cranach workshop in Wittenberg, which is why the German scholar of Pomeranian art, Hellmuth Bethe (1901-1959), assumed that their author might have been Thomas Nether (or Neeter), a painter working from1564 at the court of Duke Barnim IX of Szczecin (1501-1573), mentioned in the 1571 census as the painter to Duke Johann Friedrich (1542-1600). Justyna Bądkowska