The Painting Finished before Death

Behind the tabernacle and the altar table there hangs high on the wall an enormous painting of Saint James by Václav Vavřinec Reiner from the year 1739, in a broad baroque frame; from a distance one cannot even see how far behind the altar proper it is. The painter received twelve hundred Rhenish gulden for it and is said to have painted it during the great plague — and scarcely had he finished it when he died.