In 1892 Paul Keppler, a Catholic theology professor at Tübingen, predicted that one painter’s name “will forever have an evil ring in the history of religious painting.” The painter’s offence? He had brought the Saviour into a country nursery “not to bless the children but to wash their faces and wipe their noses, for this Saviour can and will do nothing else.”
The painter was Fritz von Uhde, a former Saxon cavalry captain, and Keppler’s prediction has aged badly. Uhde kept Christ in a plain robe that belongs to no century and walked him into the rooms and fields of the 1880s: a village schoolroom, a poor family’s table, a meadow at evening. Keppler called it a “crime against religion”; others found it blasphemous. The insults hid a question that still stings: if Christ turned up among the people you would rather not sit next to, would you recognise him?
Below are all 28 pictures by or attributed to Uhde in our Bible-art collection, each with its story, its oddest fact and what people said about it.
Fritz von Uhde at a glance
- Who: Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911), German painter, one of the first in Germany to paint in open air and daylight, known above all for painting Christ among the poor people of his own day.
- Born: 22 May 1848 at Schloss Wolkenburg in Saxony. His father, a lawyer, rose to become president of the Saxon Lutheran church’s governing consistory in Dresden.
- Died: Munich, 25 February 1911, aged 62.
- First career: cavalry officer from 1867. He fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and left the army as a cavalry captain in 1877–78.
- Teachers: almost no formal training. Hans Makart turned him down in Vienna, and Munich’s three leading teachers had no place for him.
- Family: he married Amalie Endres in 1880. She died in 1886 after the birth of their third daughter, and he never remarried. The girls, Anna, Amalie and Sophie, became his favourite models.
- First Bible picture: Let the Little Children Come to Me, painted in the winter of 1883–84.
- Honours: president of the Munich Secession from 1899, and a medal of honour at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair.
- How many: Hans Rosenhagen’s 1908 catalogue of his paintings lists 78 religious pictures, 64 of them from the New Testament. Some, like his 1896 Christ, are known today only from that book’s black-and-white plates.
- Bible text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Tobit, which the BSB doesn’t include, is quoted from the King James Apocrypha.
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The officer who went looking for soul
Uhde’s career began with a string of rejections. As a boy he copied Adolph Menzel’s illustrations of Frederick the Great, and when his father showed the drawings to Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Munich’s most famous painter, Kaulbach reportedly called Menzel the “end-point of hideousness.” Uhde lasted about three months at the Dresden Academy in 1866, drawing plaster casts, and then joined the Saxon cavalry. He rode through the Franco-Prussian War as a staff officer and left the army in 1877–78, around the age of thirty, to paint full time. Makart said no, and so did Munich’s three top teachers.
Two painters rescued him. In Paris in 1879–80 he worked beside the Hungarian Mihály Munkácsy, who was then painting his enormous Christ before Pilate, and picked up Munkácsy’s dark, brown studio manner. Back in Munich, Max Liebermann, who in Rosenhagen’s phrase played the “wolf in the sheepfold” there, sent him to Holland in 1882 “to understand what air and light are.” Liebermann knew about scandal. His Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple had caused an uproar in Munich in 1879, much of it openly antisemitic. Uhde reportedly acquired that picture in a swap around the time he began painting Christ, and he kept it until his death.
Uhde later explained, in a 1906–07 interview, why daylight wasn’t enough. He wanted pictures that grip people, “otherwise you can’t lure a dog out from behind the stove with your pictures,” and he added: “The Impressionists only want a new painterly formula. I was looking for something like soul.”
Let the Little Children Come to Me (1884)
The story: In Judea beyond the Jordan, people bring their little children to Jesus for a blessing, and when his disciples turn them away he overrules them (Matthew 19:13–15); Uhde sets the scene in a German village schoolroom of 1884.
But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
Matthew 19:14 · BSB
The picture started with a real schoolroom. According to Rosenhagen, Uhde walked in on a friendly young pastor surrounded by village children and put Christ in the pastor’s place. Uhde’s own version is less poetic: “I had once seen children coming up to a clergyman — I used that.”
The art historian Richard Muther recorded that at its 1884 showing the picture “became the object of embittered attacks on account of this figure,” meaning Christ. Church-minded circles, Rosenhagen wrote, suspected “an assault on hallowed traditions and on the standing of the Church.” People also mocked the children’s footwear. Ostini remembered critics who smiled at “the clumsy boots of his little children before Christ.” Only a plain robe sets Christ apart, and he has no halo.
The attack also came from the other side. Vincent van Gogh knew the picture only from a reproduction his brother Theo sent him, and in June 1885 he complained that it had “something cold in it, like in the new brick houses and schools and Methodist churches.” He would have preferred peasant children “without a mystical figure of Christ.” So the churchmen thought Christ looked too ordinary, and Van Gogh thought he shouldn’t be there at all.
Only Mark records Jesus’ mood here: he was “indignant” (Mark 10:14), not with the children but with the grown men who had decided who was allowed near him.
Let the Little Children Come to Me, second version (1885)
The story: People bring their little children to Jesus in Judea beyond the Jordan so that he will touch them, and he takes them in his arms and blesses them (Mark 10:13–16); a year after his breakthrough, Uhde painted the same village schoolroom again.
And He took the children in His arms, placed His hands on them, and blessed them.
Mark 10:16 · BSB
A year after the Leipzig canvas, Uhde painted the subject again, at about a third of the width: 70 by 94 centimetres against roughly 188 by 290. It isn’t a copy, and you can play spot-the-difference: the pale flagstones have turned to red brick, and the group at the left has changed. The signature reads “F. Uhde 1885.”
In 1908 the picture hung in a private house in Worms; today it is reported to be in Greifswald. The recorded reactions, from Muther, Rosenhagen and Van Gogh, concern the 1884 picture. Keppler’s nose-wiping sneer of 1892 could fit either.
The people in Mark brought the children “for Him to place His hands on them” (Mark 10:13). Jesus gave more than they asked: he took them in his arms as well, a detail only Mark records.
And Jesus Called a Little Child to Him (undated)
The story: At Capernaum the disciples argue about which of them is the greatest, and Jesus calls a little child to stand among them (Matthew 18:1–4; Mark 9:33–37); Uhde paints the scene in a plain street.
Jesus invited a little child to stand among them.
Matthew 18:2 · BSB
Uhde’s own cataloguer never mentions this picture. It isn’t in Rosenhagen’s 1908 catalogue, and the only date attached to it online, “c. 1904,” comes from a print seller. A rougher oil study with the same grouping, the child in red, was sold in Berlin in 2014 and catalogued as c. 1884. The date of our picture is unknown, and so is its owner.
The disciples had asked, “Who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” (Matthew 18:1). Jesus answered with the child standing in front of them: “whoever humbles himself like this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).
Jesus at the table
German families have long said a grace before meals, and one of the best-known begins Komm, Herr Jesu, sei unser Gast: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.” Uhde took the prayer literally and painted Christ turning up at the table. He painted the idea three times, twice in 1885 and once in 1892. In between, in 1886, he painted the most famous meal of all, with a cast that the Berlin public called a gang of robbers.
Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest (The Mealtime Prayer, 1885)
The story: The picture illustrates the German table grace “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” with Christ answering it in person at a poor family’s table, as he promises the church in Laodicea in Revelation 3:20 to come in and eat with anyone who opens the door.
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me.
Revelation 3:20 · BSB
Berlin’s National Gallery turned this picture down in 1885 and then bought it in 1886, according to the museum’s own record. The same record notes that the official church voice of the time, the Christliches Kunstblatt, sharply rejected pictures like this, of Christ in a poor peasant room, well into the 1890s.
Look at the feet. Christ is barefoot and the host wears wooden clogs, so the guest has less on his feet than the poor man he is visiting. He also wears a thin halo, which, Ostini noted, Uhde mostly left out when he showed Christ as a man among men. Rosenhagen admired the housewife’s “almost mistrustful, watchful glance at the stranger,” and praised Uhde for keeping out the theatrical: “How near lay the danger of theatricality or false pathos!”
Revelation 3:20 is often painted as Christ knocking at a door. In the text it is addressed to the church at Laodicea, which said of itself, “I am rich; I have grown wealthy and need nothing” (Revelation 3:17). The promise to come in and eat was made to a church that thought it had everything, and Uhde gave it to a family that has soup and bread.
Christ with the Peasants (c. 1887–88)
The story: On the Mount of Olives Jesus tells his disciples that whatever is done for “the least of these” is done for him (Matthew 24:3; 25:31–40); Uhde’s small panel shows Christ blessing a poor family’s bowl, the German grace “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest” made literal.
And the King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’
Matthew 25:40 · BSB
On 20 March 1893 the French State bought this small German panel at a Paris auction for the Musée du Luxembourg. Ostini called that a rare honour for a German painter. Uhde had ridden against France as a cavalry officer in 1870–71, and twenty-two years later France bought his picture of Christ at supper. The sources we checked give neither the price nor the reason. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay.
Rosenhagen, Uhde’s cataloguer, preferred the Berlin picture. He wrote that here, apart from “the wonderful face of the praying young woman,” the “inner life in this work appears less strong.” He also noted that Christ blesses the steaming dish “with the traditional hand-gesture of the clergy.”
In Matthew 25 the King’s list includes this very scene: “I was a stranger and you took Me in” (Matthew 25:35). The surprise is that the righteous didn’t know whom they had fed. They ask, “Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You…?” (Matthew 25:37), and the King answers that what they did for the least of his brothers, they did for him.
The Last Supper (1886)
The story: At the Passover meal in Jerusalem on the night before his death, Jesus tells the Twelve that one of them will betray him, and they grieve and ask one by one, “Surely not I, Lord?” (Matthew 26:20–25).
And while they were eating, He said to them, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray Me.” They were deeply grieved and began to ask Him one after another, “Surely not I, Lord?”
Matthew 26:21–22 · BSB
Six years before Keppler’s essay, the Berlin public had already found a name for these disciples. When the picture first appeared at the Berlin Jubilee Exhibition of 1886, Rosenhagen reports, people “were appalled at the vulgar conception of the apostles and spoke of a gang of robbers.” (Muther says it first appeared at the Paris Salon of 1886, so even the premiere is disputed.) In 1892 Keppler moved the meal to a prison: Uhde “depicts a supper in a penitentiary, and one marvels at the physiognomies of the criminals.”
Ostini defended the weather-beaten disciples by pointing to the faces Dürer gave his apostles on the Munich panels. Rosenhagen went all the way: “The whole nineteenth century has seen no religious picture that contains as much genuine and pure feeling as this Last Supper.” He also claimed Uhde was the first to put the light source behind a Last Supper, so that Christ, facing the window, is both the spiritual and the painterly centre. The picture was still with a dealer in 1902 and is now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
According to Rosenhagen, Uhde believed the disciples were people of low station, a view that “agrees with the Gospel account.” The New Testament agrees. When the council in Jerusalem met Peter and John, they “realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men” (Acts 4:13). In Matthew’s account, though, the disciples aren’t studying each other’s faces. Each one asks about himself: “Surely not I, Lord?”
After 1886: a sermon in a field
In 1886 Uhde’s wife Amalie died after the birth of their third daughter, Sophie. He was in his late thirties, with three girls under six. He never remarried and brought them up himself, and they became the models he used most. His friend Franz Hermann Meissner, who knew him well, described a correct, reserved former officer and added: “He carries sorrow in him — but shrinks from betraying it.” Meissner also recorded a surprising confession. Uhde had once moved house because every morning, when the Munich cavalry rode out to exercise with a band playing, he was overcome with homesickness for the army.
His work in these years moved outdoors, first to the countryside around Dachau and then, from 1894, to summers on Lake Starnberg.
The Sermon on the Mount (1887)
The story: In Galilee Jesus sees the crowds, goes up on a mountain, sits down and teaches them the Beatitudes, and when he finishes they are astonished at his authority (Matthew 5–7); Uhde moves the sermon to a village meadow at evening.
When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astonished at His teaching, because He taught as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
Matthew 7:28–29 · BSB
Uhde’s first Bible scene under the open sky was, awkwardly for a pioneer of open-air painting, painted indoors. Rosenhagen was blunt: as an open-air picture it was “not very convincing,” because Uhde “had to arrange the whole situation in the studio.” Rosenhagen also read it as grief-work, painted the year after Amalie’s death: “a monument to his own trust in God after the hard blow that had struck him.”
The critics looked at the audience. Ostini remembered people smiling at “the spotted and checked dresses of the women listening in his Sermon on the Mount.” Keppler said Uhde had reduced Christ to the level “of a fanatical sect preacher.” The picture later sold for 8,100 marks to the new Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, where it still is. And the tools we can make out at the back of the crowd are hay rakes, not the scythes that Muther saw.
The sermon Matthew records opens with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Uhde’s critics wanted a more dignified audience. Matthew’s crowd was an ordinary one, and what astonished it was that Jesus taught “not as their scribes.”
Christ Preaching at the Lake (c. 1895–96)
The story: On the shore of the Sea of Galilee the crowd grows so large that Jesus teaches from a boat and tells them parables such as the sower (Mark 4:1–20); Uhde moved the scene to a lake of his own day.
Once again Jesus began to teach beside the sea, and such a large crowd gathered around Him that He got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people crowded along the shore.
Mark 4:1 · BSB
Uhde spent every summer from 1894 on Lake Starnberg, south of Munich, and his biographers connected the setting with that lake. Our picture is probably a study or variant of the finished version, which Ostini described in 1902 with the painter’s two daughters sitting together at the centre of the crowd. The finished picture, at least, was partly a family portrait.
The two biographers disagreed about how well the finished picture worked. Rosenhagen thought the Christ in the boat seemed “rather to be telling an exciting story than the parable of the Sower.” Ostini saw a holy man telling people stories “like a father to his children.” It is hard not to hear the widowed father of three in Ostini’s phrase.
Mark describes the method: Jesus taught “to the extent that they could understand” (Mark 4:33), and “privately He explained everything to His own disciples” (Mark 4:34). The crowd on the shore got the stories, and the ones who stayed got the explanations.
Christ and Nicodemus (1896)
The story: In Jerusalem, at night, the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to question Jesus, and Jesus tells him that no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again (John 3:1–21).
He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs You are doing if God were not with him.” Jesus replied, “Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”
John 3:2–3 · BSB
Even Uhde’s most devoted critic gave up on this one. Rosenhagen called the painting “flat and feeble.” He argued that a conversation about eternal life “mocks any rendering through gestures and facial expressions,” so Uhde had tried to paint what painting can’t show.
It does have one odd, quiet detail: a raised hand appears in the dark glass of the window, apparently a reflection of Christ’s gesture. The canvas belonged to a Berlin collector, Emma Dernburg, in 1908, and, according to auction records cited on Wikimedia Commons, it was sold three times in 2008–09. The online file name that dates it to 1886 is wrong.
Rosenhagen’s complaint has an echo in the text itself. “The wind blows where it wishes,” Jesus told Nicodemus. “You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going” (John 3:8). A painter can show wind only by what it moves, and John shows this man moving: a few chapters later Nicodemus speaks up for Jesus before the chief priests and Pharisees (John 7:50–51).
Christmas on a muddy road
Of the 64 New Testament pictures in Uhde’s 1908 catalogue, 28 belong to the birth and childhood of Jesus: journeys to Bethlehem, holy nights, kings, and eight flights into Egypt or rests on the way. They also drew some of the most personal attacks. Keppler described one of Uhde’s Flight into Egypt pictures, which one is not known, as “a family expelled and hunted by the police — no doubt not without reason.”
The Difficult Journey (The Journey to Bethlehem, 1890)
The story: Ordered to register in his ancestral town, Joseph walks from Nazareth to Bethlehem with Mary, who is about to give birth (Luke 2:1–7); Uhde puts the couple on a muddy village road at dusk.
So Joseph also went up from Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, since he was from the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to him in marriage and was expecting a child.
Luke 2:4–5 · BSB
Uhde painted it as The Journey to Bethlehem. It was exhibited as Schwerer Gang, “The Difficult Journey,” and Ostini explains why: the name was changed “to spare sensitive souls.” Meissner was scathing about the fuss. The picture, he wrote, was renamed once it became clear that a chaste depiction of a pregnant Mary “threatened to bring down the proud edifice of the Church in Germany.” In Paris it hung under a third title, L’auberge est là-bas! (“The inn is over there!”).
The sensitive souls lost. The Prince Regent of Bavaria bought it straight from Uhde in 1890, it won a gold medal in Vienna in 1891, and Rosenhagen called it probably Uhde’s most popular picture. Meissner identifies the frame strapped to Joseph’s back as a saw, for a carpenter on the road. A near-identical second version painted for the Jewish publisher Rudolf Mosse has its own story: it was sold in the forced Mosse auction of 1934, returned to the heirs in 2016 and bought back by Museum Wiesbaden in 2017. The Munich picture shown here was not affected.
Luke is less delicate than whoever renamed the picture. His word for Mary’s state is plain: she “was expecting a child.” He is also grander. The couple on that road are heading for “the city of David,” because Joseph “was from the house and line of David” (Luke 2:4), and the child born there will be announced to shepherds as “a Savior… Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11).
Christmas Eve (c. 1890)
The story: In Bethlehem, far from home for the census, the time comes for Mary to give birth, and there is no room for the couple at the inn (Luke 2:6–7); Uhde imagines the moment before, on a snowy village road.
While they were there, the time came for her Child to be born.
Luke 2:6 · BSB
Is this a Bible picture at all? Rosenhagen settles it: Der heilige Abend (Christmas Eve) was one of the titles under which Uhde repeated his journey-to-Bethlehem motif. The only sign that this young woman is Mary is a thin halo. Ostini noticed a “barely visible” one on the best-known version in 1902, and ours has one too.
Ostini called the best-known version of this snowscape “the most beautiful piece of landscape Uhde ever painted.” We can’t lend his praise to our picture with a clear conscience, though, because the woman in our file stands larger and further right than in the 1894 photograph of that version. Either Uhde repainted her, which he did on other canvases, or ours is a separate variant.
Luke says only that “the time came.” Paul uses the same idea for the whole story: “But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). The young woman by Uhde’s fence belongs to that larger timetable.
The Holy Night (triptych, 1888–89)
The story: On the night Jesus is born in Bethlehem, Mary lays him in a manger, and shepherds, told the news by an angel, hurry to find the family (Luke 2:1–20); Uhde paints it as a three-panel picture in the form of an altarpiece, set in a timber barn.
So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph and the Baby, who was lying in the manger.
Luke 2:16 · BSB
At its Munich debut in 1888, Rosenhagen reports, “certain opponents” found that Uhde “had given his Madonna the features of a harlot who had borne her child in a low dive.” They also objected that women and children come along with the shepherds, and they fumed at angels who “look and behave like merry children.” Uhde repainted Mary’s face, hands and clothing, and in 1892 the Dresden gallery bought the revised triptych. The face you see is the second one.
Keppler, writing in 1892, attacked it too. He saw “a down-and-out vagabond woman” giving birth to “a wretched little worm of a child,” and felt “disgust, mixed with horror and dread” on learning “that this is supposed to be the Holy Night.” Muther loved the angels, “no naked Loves painted in the fashion of the Italians, but the departed innocents in white robes and with flowers in their hair.” The left wing shows shepherds, not the kings that some descriptions of it claim.
Critics called the setting a dive, but Luke’s own details are not much grander: an animal’s feeding trough, “because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). And the angel’s “good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10) went first to men “keeping watch over their flocks by night” (Luke 2:8).
The Holy Night (undated)
The story: With no room at the inn in Bethlehem, Mary gives birth to her firstborn and lays him in a manger (Luke 2:7); Uhde makes it a night in a barn with the cooking under way.
And she gave birth to her firstborn, a Son. She wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7 · BSB
No angels or shepherds come to this one; instead, Joseph cooks. Rosenhagen was not charmed. He cited this composition, in its 1893 panel version, as proof that Uhde’s religious painting was getting “weaker,” with props doing the work that feeling had done before: “the old man cooking a little soup on a spirit stove on an overturned wheelbarrow.”
Our canvas is a larger variant that isn’t in the 1908 catalogue. It turned up at auction in Vienna in 2012, and a canvas of the same size, apparently the same one, was estimated at just €1,200–1,500 in Munich in 2016 and sold for €7,620.
Rosenhagen distrusted props, but in Luke the sign the angel gives the shepherds is made of ordinary objects: “You will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12). The Saviour was announced by an angel and identified by a feeding trough.
The Three Kings See the Star (1896)
The story: Magi from the east come to Jerusalem looking for the newborn King of the Jews, and after meeting King Herod they follow the star to the place in Bethlehem where the Child is, and rejoice (Matthew 2:1–12).
After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the Child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced with great delight.
Matthew 2:9–10 · BSB
Uhde refused to modernise the Magi. Rosenhagen explains that realism “could hardly bring out” the fairy-tale mood of the Magi, so Uhde used “fantastic costumes and atmospheric landscapes.” The painter who had sent Mary and Joseph down a muddy village road let the kings keep their finery.
The picture belonged to a collector near Meran in 1908, and we could not trace it after that. It also isn’t the Magdeburg Wise Men that it is sometimes confused with online; that one shows the kings at Mary’s window. Uhde painted a whole series of Magi pictures, and one of them went to the royal house of Romania.
Matthew gives the Magi a single line of emotion, “they rejoiced with great delight,” and then shows what the finery was for: “they fell down and worshiped Him. Then they opened their treasures” (Matthew 2:11).
The Flight into Egypt (1891)
The story: Warned in a dream that King Herod means to kill the Child, Joseph gets up in the night and flees with Mary and Jesus to Egypt (Matthew 2:13–15).
So he got up, took the Child and His mother by night, and withdrew to Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”
Matthew 2:14–15 · BSB
Uhde’s Flight is a sequel. Ostini saw “almost the same road as on the ‘Schwerer Gang’” with “the same couple,” except that now they come towards us and the mother carries her child. Uhde painted it in 1891 and later repainted it; Ostini thought the figures dated from 1895 or 1896, which explains the different dates online. Unlike the Schwerer Gang, this road has a halo on it, for the child: “A dense glory hovers over the Child’s head.”
We found no record of the painting after 1908, when a Munich gallery had it.
Keppler meant his “hunted by the police” as a sneer, but the first half is close to what Matthew describes: a family running at night because “Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him” (Matthew 2:13). In Matthew the reason was not the family’s guilt. It was a king who felt threatened: “When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed” (Matthew 2:3).
The Holy Family in the Workshop (c. 1892)
The story: After presenting the baby Jesus at the Temple, Mary and Joseph return to Nazareth in Galilee, where the child grows up (Luke 2:39–40); Uhde sets the Holy Family at the door of a sunlit woodshed.
And the Child grew and became strong. He was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him.
Luke 2:40 · BSB
Only the title tells you this family is holy. Nobody has a halo, and Joseph is an old man with an axe in a woodshed rather than a carpenter at a bench. Rosenhagen made a dry remark about two sister pictures from the same year: a young mother at a cradle, plus “a man sawing or chopping wood,” was enough to “count as a ‘Holy Family’.” That remark was about those other two pictures, but it fits this one too.
The painting is in Dresden, yet we could not find it in the 1908 catalogue.
Earlier in the chapter Luke gives a clue to the family’s means. At the Temple they offered “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons” (Luke 2:24), the offering the Law allowed a mother who “cannot afford a lamb” (Leviticus 12:8). Luke’s Holy Family was poor too.
Easter without angels
By 1890, Rosenhagen wrote of The Difficult Journey, “the charge of profanation was hardly raised any more,” though Keppler’s attack was still to come. Munich’s royal collection bought three of his Bible pictures between 1890 and 1897, Vienna put one in the imperial gallery, and in 1900 Paris gave him a medal of honour. His Easter pictures from these years leave out the spectacle of the empty tomb. They show mourners, people on a road, and the risen Christ mistaken for a gardener.
The Entombment of Christ (c. 1900)
The story: On the evening of Good Friday, outside Jerusalem, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus carry the body of Jesus to a new tomb in a nearby garden before the Sabbath begins (John 19:38–42).
Now there was a garden in the place where Jesus was crucified, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. And because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and the tomb was nearby, they placed Jesus there.
John 19:41–42 · BSB
Uhde reportedly counted his big Entombment of 1894 among his main works; his own cataloguer called it a mistake. Our small Budapest canvas repeats its composition, and the museum thinks it was probably a study for it. Ostini counted the big picture among the “standard works” of Uhde’s religious art. Rosenhagen saw “the finest lyric poet among German painters trying his hand at a pathos-laden subject foreign to his gift.”
Uhde painted the soldiers dicing for Christ’s robe, and he painted the burial, but Rosenhagen’s 1908 catalogue lists no Crucifixion at all.
John reminds us who brought the spices: “Nicodemus, who had previously come to Jesus at night” (John 19:39). The man who once came in the dark asking questions came back to help bury him.
Easter Morning (1891)
The story: At sunrise on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome take spices to Jesus’ tomb outside Jerusalem to anoint his body (Mark 16:1–8).
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could go and anoint the body of Jesus. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they went to the tomb.
Mark 16:1–2 · BSB
The only Easter in Easter Morning is a wall. Rosenhagen noted that Uhde tried to justify the title with nothing more than “the melancholy churchyard wall lining the field path.” Rosenhagen called the three women “Arbeiterfrauen,” working women, and Ostini saw “purely human, everyday grief, without further hints at the biblical background.” Ostini read them as coming back from the grave, not going to it. They “have not understood the message,” he wrote, “or they do not believe it.”
The picture also travelled. By 1902 it was almost unknown in Europe and belonged to a “Mr. L. Crist Delmonico” in America. It has since surfaced again in the German art trade.
On the way, Mark says, the women asked each other, “Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark 16:3). The stone had already been moved (Mark 16:4). If you are walking toward something you can’t lift, that verse is worth taking with you.
Woman, Why Weepest Thou? (late 1890s)
The story: At the empty tomb in a garden outside Jerusalem, the risen Jesus asks the weeping Mary Magdalene why she is crying, and she takes him for the gardener (John 20:11–15).
“Woman, why are you weeping?” Jesus asked. “Whom are you seeking?” Thinking He was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried Him off, tell me where you have put Him, and I will get Him.”
John 20:15 · BSB
Uhde gave Jesus a gardener’s hat. The big woven object slung on his back looks like a basket, but Ostini, describing the composition, called it “a gardener’s hat, which hangs on his back.” Ostini also identified the garden as a real one, the garden of Uhde’s studio building on Theresienstraße in Munich. Mary’s mistake in John 20 makes more sense when the risen Christ is dressed for the job.
Uhde reworked the subject several times. Rosenhagen says he arrived at a definitive composition in the mid-1890s and later used it for this Vienna picture. After Uhde’s 1900 exhibition at the Galerie Miethke in Vienna it went into the imperial picture gallery, and it came to the Belvedere in 1921.
Mary’s tears are real, and the question isn’t a rebuke. Jesus asks her why she is crying before he tells her anything.
Noli me tangere (1894)
The story: On Easter morning in the garden of the tomb, the risen Jesus calls Mary Magdalene by name, tells her not to cling to him, and sends her to his disciples (John 20:16–18).
Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). “Do not cling to Me,” Jesus said, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and tell My brothers, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God.’”
John 20:16–17 · BSB
Here Uhde’s Christ turns grand. Ostini called it “a peculiar whim of the artist” to set a Christ “who could just as well have stepped out of the frame of a Rubens” opposite “a completely modern Magdalene, in this decidedly modern Dachau landscape.” Then he admitted it worked, and said few of Uhde’s pictures equal it in unity of feeling. The Bavarian state bought it from Uhde at the Munich Secession exhibition of 1894, the year it was painted.
Rosenhagen admired Mary’s face, “hovering between astonishment, grief and joy,” but found Christ’s “elegantly dainty gesture of refusal” rather “unfelt.” Ostini wrote the best line about her: “These eyes have wept too much to be able to shine with jubilation already.”
Then Mary went and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” (John 20:18). In John’s account she is the first to announce that she has seen the risen Lord.
The Road to Emmaus (1891)
The story: Later that same Easter day, two of Jesus’ followers walk from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus, talking about his death, and the risen Jesus joins them without being recognised (Luke 24:13–35).
And as they talked and deliberated, Jesus Himself came up and walked along with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing Him.
Luke 24:15–16 · BSB
Luke’s famous conversation on the road is left out of this picture, and all three walkers have their backs to us. Rosenhagen explains the choice: because “one cannot paint the content of a conversation,” Uhde gave “essentially only the picture of a peaceful evening landscape.” That is Rosenhagen’s explanation rather than Uhde’s, but it fits.
It is a large pastel, about 66 by 90 centimetres, and was in the Dresden royal print room by 1908. Emmaus became a favourite subject: this is the first of five Emmaus road pictures in the 1908 catalogue.
Luke tells us what that conversation was: “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself” (Luke 24:27). Afterwards they asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us as He spoke with us on the road…?” (Luke 24:32).
The Road to Emmaus (1897)
The story: Toward evening on the first Easter, the two disciples reach Emmaus with the stranger who has joined them on the road and beg him to stay the night (Luke 24:28–29).
But they pleaded with Him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So He went in to stay with them.
Luke 24:29 · BSB
Uhde’s Herr, bleibe bei uns (“Lord, stay with us”) is a different, upright canvas of 1894, though this small panel is sometimes filed under its name. Ours is the 1897 Gang nach Emmaus, the last of his Emmaus road pictures in the 1908 catalogue, when it belonged to the Berlin collector Ed. Arnhold. No period critic seems to have written about it.
It closes a loop in this article. The walk ends at a table. “While He was reclining at the table with them, He took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it,” and “their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus” (Luke 24:30–31). The two disciples didn’t recognise him on a long walk. They recognised him at supper, which is where Uhde had been putting him since 1885.
The miracle problem
Uhde’s Christ rarely does anything miraculous. Of the 64 New Testament pictures in the 1908 catalogue, one is a healing scene, and none shows a nature miracle or the Crucifixion. When Uhde did try one, his own cataloguer was unconvinced: the miracle of the Ascension, Rosenhagen wrote, “can never be made believable by painting.” These four pictures are where Uhde came nearest to the supernatural, or painted light instead.
Christ (The Light Shines in the Darkness, 1896)
The story: John’s Gospel opens by calling Christ the true light that shines in the darkness (John 1:1–9); in 1896 Uhde painted Christ in a dark vaulted room, lit by sunlight, for a series of nine pictures of Christ by different German painters.
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:5 · BSB
Uhde explained this one himself, in a letter quoted by Ostini: “I based the conception on a word from the first chapter of John’s Gospel: ‘And the light shineth in darkness.’” He wanted the sunlight to do what painters usually do with halos: “All attributes pointing to the supernatural have been avoided; the conception was to be as simple as possible.” The series was made at the suggestion of Consul Theodor Bierck and included Franz Stuck and Hans Thoma.
Ostini found it “not very Uhde-like” at first glance and blamed “the stimulus from outside.” The colour original was last recorded with a Frankfurt art dealer in 1908. Today it is known only from the black-and-white book plate reproduced here.
Uhde said what he hoped the light would mean: the Saviour “brings the light of the Gospel into the darkness of the human heart.” John adds that the contest is already decided: the darkness “has not overcome it.”
Christ Healing a Sick Child (study)
The story: At sunset in Capernaum, people bring their sick to Jesus, and he lays his hands on each one and heals them (Luke 4:38–41); in this small oil study, attributed to Uhde, a young woman holding a pale child faces a healer seen from behind.
At sunset, all who were ill with various diseases were brought to Jesus, and laying His hands on each one, He healed them.
Luke 4:40 · BSB
A word of caution first: this study is only attributed to Uhde, which means the attribution is not secure. It isn’t the large 1897 Christ Healing the Sick, with which, Rosenhagen said, Uhde “came entirely to grief.” We include it because healing the sick appears only once in his 1908 catalogue.
Its viewpoint is unusual. We stand behind Christ and see the faces of the people who have come to him, among them a young woman looking up with a pale child in her arms. The healing itself isn’t shown.
Luke’s wording is careful: Jesus laid “His hands on each one.” He met them one by one, not as a crowd.
The Ascension of Christ (1897)
The story: Forty days after Easter, on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem, the risen Jesus is taken up into heaven before his followers until a cloud hides him (Acts 1:1–11).
After He had said this, they watched as He was taken up, and a cloud hid Him from their sight.
Acts 1:9 · BSB
Uhde’s biggest miracle is three metres tall, and the critics still weren’t convinced. Rosenhagen called it partly a failure and noted that Uhde let himself be moved to repaint the figure of Christ after its first showing. Ostini found Christ “not entirely free of pose,” and thought the witnesses had become “self-conscious actors” who “play their part in the Gospel.”
Ostini’s best complaint was about the purchase. The state, he wrote, could have bought Uhde’s Last Supper cheaply but let it slip, and bought the Ascension instead “out of sheer pedantry,” because it was Uhde’s turn for a state purchase. The repainted picture has been in the Bavarian collection since 1897.
Ostini complained that Uhde’s witnesses “play their part in the Gospel.” In Acts that is exactly their commission: “you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The two men in white add a promise: “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen Him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
Design for the Zwickau Altarpiece (c. 1904)
The story: When Jesus begins preaching in Galilee, Matthew sees Isaiah’s promise fulfilled that the people living in darkness have seen a great light (Matthew 4:12–17); Uhde built his first altarpiece on that verse.
“Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.”
Matthew 4:15–16 · BSB
At the end of 1903, nearly twenty years after the insults began, a Lutheran church finally asked Uhde for an altarpiece. His modern Saxon biography calls it his first and only public altarpiece commission. He was 55, and the church was the new Luther Church in Zwickau, the Saxon town where he had gone to school. The painter whose pictures had been called a “crime against religion” got the job at last. Rosenhagen was not grateful on his behalf: “that is the misery of German art conditions,” he wrote; such tasks come to original talents “only when they can no longer feel any real joy in them.”
The finished altarpiece of 1905 was four metres tall. Our loose design is one of several stages. It was sold in Cologne in 2014 and differs from the sketch reproduced in 1908.
Matthew places the dawning light in “Galilee of the Gentiles,” among “the people living in darkness,” and that is where Jesus began to preach: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” (Matthew 4:17). A painter of village people could hardly have asked for a better verse.
Off the Gospel map
These last two pictures come from outside the Gospels. One is from the Apocrypha, and the other isn’t a Bible story at all.
Tobias and the Angel (1902)
The story: In the Book of Tobit, the blind Tobit sends his son Tobias on a long journey, and the archangel Raphael, disguised as a hired companion, goes with him; one evening they reach the river Tigris (Tobit 5–6).
And as they went on their journey, they came in the evening to the river Tigris, and they lodged there.
Tobit 6:1 · KJV Apocrypha
Uhde painted the Tobias story six times between 1893 and 1902, and this pastel is the last one recorded. Ostini was puzzled: “How he hit on this subject of all things is hard to explain.” He decided it proved Uhde really knew his Bible. Rosenhagen judged that in the journey pictures “the landscape remains the main thing.”
In the book, Raphael keeps his identity secret until near the end. Uhde gives him big white wings in plain sight, so the viewer knows more than Tobias does.
Our collection pairs the picture with Psalm 91:11: “For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.” Tobias walked the whole road with that promise beside him and didn’t know it until the end, rather like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
Forsaken (early 1890s)
The story: This is not a Bible story: in the early 1890s Uhde painted a woman alone at a table with her head down, catalogued as Verlassen (“Forsaken”), and our collection pairs it with the psalmist’s cry in Psalm 88.
Why, O LORD, do You reject me? Why do You hide Your face from me?
Psalm 88:14 · BSB
Uhde’s 1908 catalogue files this among his paintings of women, not his religious pictures, and the single word Verlassen is all the story it gives. We don’t know who she is or why she is alone, and we won’t invent a reason. Uhde painted a second, different Forsaken in the mid-1890s. This one is now in the National Museum in Warsaw, which has published an image of it.
We include it because of the psalm. Psalm 88 is unusual among the laments: it ends with no turn to praise, only “darkness is my closest companion” (Psalm 88:18). Even so, the whole psalm is addressed to God. Someone who asks God why he hides his face is still praying.
What his Christ actually does
Count the subjects in Rosenhagen’s 1908 catalogue and a clear pattern appears. Of 64 New Testament pictures, 28 are about the birth and childhood of Jesus, seven are Emmaus, five show Easter morning, six are preaching, and several more are meals. Only one shows a healing; nature miracles, the Transfiguration and the Crucifixion are all missing.
What shocked people was not his Christ’s clothes but his company. Keppler meant it as an insult when he said this Saviour “can and will do nothing else” but wipe noses. It’s also a fair summary of Uhde’s method. His Christ rarely performs. He walks up, sits down, eats, listens and blesses. Rosenhagen summed up the thought that started it all: “Christ still walks among men. One has only to recognise him.”
The contrasts in Uhde’s life are just as striking:
- The son of the church was accused of a “crime against religion.” His father had led the Saxon Lutheran church administration, and a Catholic professor predicted the son’s name would have an evil ring forever.
- The cavalry officer painted almost no violence. The man who once moved house because the Munich cavalry’s morning band made him homesick painted a Christ who walks, listens and blesses, and the 1908 catalogue lists no Crucifixion.
- The widower kept painting families. After 1886 he raised three daughters alone, and Rosenhagen thought grief may have drawn him to paint Mary as a mother.
- The open-air pioneer painted his first open-air Bible picture in the studio, and it shows.
- The man accused of mocking Christianity got his first altarpiece commission in his mid-fifties, from a Lutheran church in his school town.
Six claims about Uhde, checked
“Uhde dressed Jesus in modern clothes.” No. The people and the rooms are modern, but Christ is not. Rosenhagen describes “an inconspicuously timeless costume,” and Meissner “a long garment whose cut belongs to no particular period.” Muther notes that the Norwegian painter Christian Skredsvig “went further than Uhde” by putting Christ himself in present-day clothes.
“Critics called his paintings blasphemous.” Yes. Ostini recalled “plenty of people” who found the pictures “not only ugly but blasphemous,” and Keppler wrote of “the crime against religion that lies in these pictures.” What we did not find is a formal blasphemy charge: the legal-sounding German word Gotteslästerung belongs to the 1879 Liebermann affair, not to Uhde.
“He was a Christian socialist making a political point.” We found no source linking Uhde to the Christian-social movement of his day. The objection to his pictures was partly social, though. Looking back in 1908, Rosenhagen wrote that “out of class-consciousness or arrogance” people protested against “the figures of labour and poverty that suddenly marched into pictures in droves.” Keppler said Social Democracy “could wish for no other art,” though in that passage he was writing about poor-people painting in general and didn’t name Uhde. His friend Meissner called him “the most important of the social artists.” Uhde’s own explanation was about art: he wanted pictures with “something like soul.” So a social shock, yes; a political programme, not on the evidence we found.
“He was the first to paint a realistic Christ.” No, and his admirers said so. Rosenhagen: “Certainly Uhde was not the first in this period who dared to put the figure of the Saviour realistically into a picture again.” Menzel, Liebermann and Ernst Zimmermann had all depicted Jesus in the Temple before him. What was new was that Uhde brought Christ into the viewer’s own time and place, and kept doing it for twenty years.
“He was a German Impressionist.” Partly true. A modern Saxon biography calls him “one of the most important masters of German Impressionism,” and he did learn light in Holland. But Uhde himself dismissed the label: “The Impressionists only want a new painterly formula.”
“The church condemned him.” It was never that simple. The Protestant Christliches Kunstblatt rejected such pictures into the 1890s, yet Keppler complained that Protestant defenders were claiming them “as the first purely evangelical conceptions and representations of sacred history.” The fiercest attack we found came from a Catholic theologian, and the modernists attacked him from the other side: Julius Meier-Graefe called the “much talked of new ideal of Christ” “completely superficial.”
How to pray with an Uhde
Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is an old way of praying with an image, the visual sister of lectio divina. Try it with Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest.
- Look. Spend a minute with the picture before you think about it. Let your eye go wherever it goes first, then notice where it goes next.
- Meditate. Read Revelation 3:20 slowly: “If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me.” Which person at that table are you today?
- Pray. Tell God plainly what your own table looks like right now, whether it is full, bare, crowded or lonely, and ask him in.
- Contemplate. Sit quietly for a moment with the thought that he doesn’t wait for the room to be tidy.
Frequently asked questions
- Who was Fritz von Uhde?
- Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911) was a German painter from Saxony, a former cavalry officer who became one of the first German painters to work in open air and daylight. He is best known for Bible scenes that put Christ among the poor people of his own day, such as Let the Little Children Come to Me (1884) and Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest (1885).
- Why were Uhde’s paintings called blasphemous?
- Because he put Christ among ordinary, poor, modern people, which many viewers of the 1880s found “not only ugly but blasphemous,” in the words of his biographer Ostini. The 1886 Last Supper disciples were called “a gang of robbers,” his Madonna was said to look like a harlot, and in 1892 the Catholic theologian Paul Keppler called the pictures a “crime against religion.” At the same time, museums had been buying his work since 1886.
- What is Fritz von Uhde’s most famous painting?
- Come, Lord Jesus, Be Our Guest (1885), in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and Let the Little Children Come to Me (1884), in Leipzig, are the best known. Rosenhagen thought The Difficult Journey (1890), in Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, was his most popular.
- Did Uhde paint Jesus in modern clothes?
- No. Christ wears a plain robe that belongs to no particular period. The other people in the pictures, and the rooms and landscapes, belong to Germany and Holland in the 1880s and 1890s.
- Was Fritz von Uhde religious?
- By his friends’ account, yes, though not in a churchly way. Rosenhagen wrote that the 1886 Last Supper proved his religiosity came “from a pure and believing heart,” while Ostini said Uhde came to religious subjects out of artistic aims “and not from churchly belief,” and that a devout inwardness grew in him through the work. Uhde himself talked about art rather than doctrine: he was “looking for something like soul.” His father led the Saxon Lutheran church administration.
- Where can I see Fritz von Uhde’s paintings?
- The Neue Pinakothek in Munich, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris all own his Bible paintings, though several are kept in storage, so check before you travel.
- How many religious paintings did Uhde make?
- Hans Rosenhagen’s 1908 catalogue lists 78 religious paintings: 64 from the New Testament and 14 from the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Uhde lived until 1911, so a few later works are not included.
Play an Uhde
All 28 paintings in this article are playable as web puzzles in our Open Gallery. Here are six places to begin:
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