Lot 16A: The Master of the Female Half-Lengths (active Antwerp?, 1st half 16th Century)

Thisbe (?) with monogram 'CG' (lower centre) oil on panel 91/4 x 11. 1/8 in. (23.4 x 28.1 cm.) PROVENANCE with Willems, Brussels, 1957. with P. de Boer, Amsterdam, 1957, from whom purchased by the father of the present owner. LITERATURE R.A. Koch, Joachim Patinir, 1968, pp. 61 and 89, fig. 90, as Workshop of the Master of the Half-Lengths, the subject identified as Lucretia. EXHIBITION Laren, Singer Museum, Nederlandse Primitieven uit Nederlands particulier bezit, 1 July-10 September 1961, no. 102, as Joachim Patinir. Amsterdam, Gallery P. de Boer, Nederland waterland. De relatie tussen land en water in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van 1500 tot nu, 13 January-19 February 1972, no. 29, illustrated, as Joachim Patinir. NOTES The Master of the Female Half-Lengths is the name given to what was apparently a workshop that specialized in small-scale panels of aristocratic young ladies in half-length and devotional scenes: they are shown reading, writing or playing musical instruments, usually in a wood-panelled interior or against a neutral background. Some of the women are represented with an ointment jar, the attribute of Mary Magdalene. The workshop also produced a group of landscapes that clearly show the influence of Joachim Patinir, with whose work they were for a long time confused. This part of the oeuvre was first comprehensively researched by Robert Koch, who assembled a nucleus of his landscapes, containing thirteen pictures, including the present one. This was at the time identified as a studio work, a distinction which has been superseded by further understanding of the Master's workshop nature. The place and period of the Master's activity have been widely disputed: suggestions have ranged from Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent and Mechelen to the French court, with dates from the early to the late-sixteenth century. Friedl„nder and Koch both placed the workshop in Antwerp and Mechelen in the 1520s and 1530s, owing to the closeness of the landscapes to those of Joachim Patinir and the similarity of the female types to those of Bernard van Orley. Koch believed that the artist may have been trained in Patinir's shop in Antwerp in circa 1520. This proposal has since been accepted by a number of writers, who have tried to identify the Master's hand in the background landscapes of paintings by Antwerp artists such as Quentin Metsys (e.g. the Virgin and Child in a Landscape, Poznan, National Museum). At least one instance is known where the Master painted the landscape background for Jan Gossaert, in a Madonna and Child in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, which is dated 1532, representing the latest secure date for his oeuvre. The present picture is typical of these landscapes: dominated by sheer rocks, crowned with firtresses with turrets and battlements, while the long, slender, sinuous trees emphasize the sense of depth. In comparison with Patinir, there is a more gradual recession from the foreground to the horizon and a softer, sketchier treatment, with rock masses less jagged in contour and a gentler use of atmospheric perspective; special attention is devoted to architectural ornaments, such as statuettes and fountains. Similarly representative is the handling of the variated foreground vegetation, the mossy tree trunks and the heavy foliage. Stylistically, this painting is extremely close to a Landscape with hunting scenes in the Mus‚e d'Art et Histoire, Geneva, and the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (see W. Gibson, 'Mirror of the Earth'. The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting, 1989, p. 16, figs. 1.33 and 1.34 respectively). Examples of the landscapist's mature style, these paintings probably date from the end of the 1520s and the first half of the 1530s, A further example from the same period was sold anonymously, Christie's, New York, 31 January 1997, lot 21 ($321,500). The subject matter of the painting remains uncertain. The female figure, her horse beside her and near a fountain with a figure of Cupid, has in the past been tentatively identified as Lucretia (Koch, loc. cit. ). However the story of Lucretia is not generally depicted in an extensive landscape, nor would this identification explain the prominent horse. In the catalogue of the 1972 exhibition, the figure was thought to represent Thisbe; nonetheless, this identification, too, is problematic, as in the iconographical tradition of the period, Thisbe is always depicted with her lover, Pyramus.