Lot 66: Willem Adriaensz. Key (Breda c. 1515/6-1568 Antwerp)

Saint Jerome adoring the Cross
oil on panel
40 5/8 x 38 3/4 in. (103.2 x 98.4 cm.)

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

This apparently previously unrecorded panel is given to Key on the basis of comparison with his only other known depiction of the subject, the Saint Jerome in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. no. 600). No recent major study has been published on Key, let alone any attempt at a comprehensive examination of his oeuvre, since Friedländer's Early Netherlandish Painting (1929, published in English 1975), and the present attribution is given pending such a study. However, stylistically this painting fits easily into Key's known output: thus, for example (and besides the clear affinities with the Munich painting), the monumental figure, painted with the developed finish typical of late Mannerist painting in Antwerp, the Italianate references also typical of that movement, and the stylistic links with Floris (with whom Van Mander related that Key trained under Lambert Lombard).

Key is nowadays perhaps best known as a portraitist, with examples in public collections such as the Portrait of a gentleman in the Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp, that in the John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, and that in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. His contemporaries, however, regarded him as primarily a history painter, and he was described as such by Guicciardini. Very few such works are known, however: Friedländer (Early Netherlandish Painting, XIII, Leiden and Brussels, 1975, nos. 267-275A) records only eleven, of which the whereabouts of the majority remain unknown, although a Virgin mourning over the Body of Christ is also in the Alte Pinakothek, whilst a Susannah and the Elders (dated 1546) and a Holy Family are in the Gemäldegalerie, Pommersfelden.

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