Sten Karling considered the carved Calvary scene to be the work of Johann Valentin Rabe. The types of figures and their carved contours, however, to the extent that we can discern from beneath the thick secondary coats of paint, point more to Ackermann’s authorship.

Carl Sigismund Walther’s painting Calvary is one of the dozens of paintings that this artist from Dresden painted in the mid-19^th century for Estonian churches. His work was quite likely relatively inexpensive and he worked quickly. Walther’s brightly coloured pictures were pleasing to congregation members uneducated in art, and the people depicted in them came across as benign.

Rudolf von zur Mühlen’s oil painting is an excellent example of how, at the end of the 19^th century, some congregations still clung to orthodox Lutheranism, with a focus on Christ’s death on the cross and the redemption of mankind by his sufferings and blood. Compared to Walther’s painting, von zur Mühlen’s painting comes across as very grim. The elevation of the retable and the enlargement of the central painting’s format is in harmony with the proportions of the new church: the message of Christ’s death on the cross and the redemption of mankind that the altar picture was meant to convey to the congregation had to be clearly visible even from the farthest corner of the church nave.

The new Hageri church was built at a time when the Estonian National Awakening movement was in full swing and the lack of text in Estonian – parables and Christian teaching – for the retable had become inappropriate. The congregation’s German elite had to take the congregation’s Estonian majority into consideration.