Workshop of The Master of Frankfurt Place Unknown 1460 - 1533 (?) Place Unknown

According to the late medieval Golden Legend Saint Anne was married three times, and by each marriage had a child called Mary. Each Mary in her turn married and had offspring. In the central panel we see the Virgin Mary, daughter of Anne's first marriage to Joachim, with Jesus. The background figures are probably intended to represent Anne's three husbands, Joachim, Cleophas and Salome, as well as Mary's husband Joseph. Anne's daughter Mary by her second marriage is shown in the right wing, with her husband Alpheus standing behind her and her sons James the Less, Joseph the Just, Simon and Jude with them. The left wing shows Anne's third daughter Mary with her husband Zebedee, and their two sons James the Greater and John the Evangelist. The iconography was popular in Northern painting of the 15th and 16th centuries but had largely died out by the Council of Trent.

This is one of a small group of related works, all probably produced in the workshop or following of the Master Frankfurt, who has now been tentatively identified as the Antwerp painter Hendrick van Wieuluwe (active probably between 1483 until his death in 1533). All derive from the Master's eponymous work, the great altarpiece of The Holy Kinship painted between 1503-6 for the Dominican church in Frankfurt (now Frankfurt, Historisches Museum, reproduced in S. Goddard, The Master of Frankfurt and his shop, Brussels 1984, p. 147, no. 67, fig. 3). The Master of Frankfurt evidently made something of a speciality of this subject, for numerous versions of this subject are known. The closest to the present work are those in the Kisters Collection, Kreuzlingen, and that from the Labrouhe de Laborderie collection, Paris, sold Amsterdam, Frederik Muller, 23 May 1922, lot 21 (see Goddard, op. cit., p. 166, no. 12, under rejected attributions), in which the poses of the central protagonists are repeated but with very different backgrounds. Friedländer (Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. VIII, Leyden and Brussels 1972, p. 106, no. 119, plate 107) suggests a possible origin for the latter in the workshop or following of Bernaert van Orley.