Lot 108: AMBROSIUS BENSON

LOMBARDY 1495-1550 BRUGES VIRGIN AND CHILD oil on oak panel 31.4 by 23.5 cm.; 12 1/4 by 9 1/4 in.

Count de Lalaing, Castle Zandbergen, Belgium, before 1950.

In 1518 Benson acquired Bruges citizenship, and in 1519 he was admitted to the Guild of painters and saddlemakers there as an independent master, with the comment that he was "from Lombardy". He may have been from Ferrara, although he was originally called Ambrogio Benzone, taking his first name from the patron saint of Milan, the capital of Lombardy. Initially he worked in the studio of Gerard David, by whom he was profoundly influenced, but after a few months the relationship went wrong and the younger painter brought a court case against David. Benson seems to have established himself successfully in Bruges within a few years of his stay, and there is plenty of evidence that his early success brought with it considerable affluence. The iconographical type of the Virgin feeding the Child is derived from a lost painting by Rogier van der Weyden known through copies, and later adopted by Benson’s teacher Gerard David. This is likely to be an early work by Benson, probably painted shortly after his arrival in Bruges by circa 1518, which is why it retains strong Lombard overtones. A tree-ring analysis (dendrochronology) of the present panel conducted in Ghent under the direction Prof. Dr M.J-P. Martens in March 2011 suggests that 1515-18 is the most probable date of execution. Infra-red imaging conducted at the same time reveals spontaneous underdrawing (see fig. 1), which shows that Benson originally intended the Virgin to be suckling the Infant Jesus, so that this work was just originally conceived as a Maria Lactans. Two later copies after this composition are known, one was sold London, Christie’s South Kensington, 29 October 2010, lot 8 (slightly bigger and of lesser quality). Another with a landscape background was in the collection of J. Fievez in Brussels in 1934.