Lot 17: The Master of the Female Half-Lengths (active Antwerp? 1st half of the 16th Century)

The Virgin and Child
oil on panel
10 1/2 x 8 in. (26.7 x 20.3 cm.)

with Abelardo Linares, Madrid by 1953 and sold to.
Count Johannes Bernhard Von Welczek, 1954, from whom purchased by the grandfather of the present owner in 1954.

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

The group of works traditionally given to the Master of the Female Half-Lengths are now thought to be, in large part, the product of a workshop, specializing in small-scale paintings of aristocratic ladies in half-length devotional scenes such as the present work. The figures are often 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 Magdalen (for example, in the painting sold at Christie's, London, 10 July 2002, lot 16 for £430,000). 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 (see, for example, the small Landscape with Saint John the Baptist sold, Christie's, New York, 31 January 1997, lot 21 for $290,000). The present work may be regarded as by the same hand as the Virgin and Child in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid (see M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, XII, Leiden, 1975, no. 61, plate 36).

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 late sixteenth century. Friedländer 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 Patenir and the similarity of the female types to those of Barent van Orley. Koch believed that the artist may have been trained in Patenir's studio in Antwerp around 1520. This proposal has since been accepted by a number of scholars, who have tried to identify the master's hand in the background landscapes of paintings by Antwerp artists such as Quinten Massys (for example the Virgin and Child in a Landscape in the National Museum, Poznan). 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, dated 1532, the latest secure date for this group.