Lot Essay
Max J. Friedländer was the first to reconstruct de Coter's largest recorded altarpiece, a Last Judgement which was originally in the church of St. Alban in Cologne, but was dismembered in the early nineteenth century (M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, IV, ed. N. Veronee-Verhaegen, Leyden and Brussels, 1969, pp. 66 and 83, no. 94, pl. 88). The present picture was identified in 1986 by Dirk De Vos, loc. cit., as the upper left corner. Four others fragments survive: Saint John the Baptist with a Group of Apostles and Saint Peter escorting the Blessed are in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. nos. 1455 and 1456), The Damned in Hell is in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne (inv. no. 524), and Saint Michael is listed by Friedländer as in the Otto Giess collection, Cologne-Braunsfeld.