Workshop of Joachim Patinir

Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1780-1863);
thence by family descent.

London, Thos. Agnew & Son Ltd, Loan Exhibition of the Lansdowne Collection, 8 December 1954 - 29 January 1955, no. 53.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external expert and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a fine flat oak panel, with unusually cut edges behind, presumably for a particular framing. The back has been primed and there is one joint in the upper part, which has moved and been reglued some time ago. It runs through the head of the Madonna, which has been carefully retouched, and across the horizon. There is one faint short very old crack from the lower right edge. Although there is scarcely any evidence of past movement or flaking in the panel, there are at present little raised lines along the grain of the wood in various places, which will need consolidation. However the painting has clearly benefitted from stable surroundings and background over a long period. The beautiful condition of the paint surface reflects minimal intervention in the past, the fine glazing is intact and rich throughout, with pure unleached depth of colour. There is a minute craquelure. Every finest detail in the landscape, or in the basket for instance or the unbroken glaze on the white fabric to the right or the Madonna's red robe, is beautifully preserved. Two minor old darkened surface retouchings can be seen on the edge of the red robe and very rarely one or two more recent matt retouchings are visible to the naked eye as also the matt line of the joint, and some touches along the top edge. However the condition virtually throughout essentially is exceptionally beautiful and intact. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
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The compositional type, with the Virgin and child seated in the centre of an expansive landscape and St Joseph reduced to a supporting role in the background, was extremely popular with south Netherlandish painters through the first quarter of the 16^thcentury. Earlier examples normally show a more vertical arrangement, with the Virgin standing tall, such as in Hans Memling's small panel in the Louvre. While Gerard David informalized the type further by seating his protagonists on a rock,¹ it was Joachim Patinir who brought the prominence of the landscape in such works to the fore. His horizontal panels on this theme almost subjugate the figures to a secondary role behind that of the meticulously detailed 'world' landscapes in which they are seated. His depictions of the Rest on the flight into Egypt in the Prado, Madrid (which is the obvious influence for the present work), the Thyssen Museum (also Madrid)² and elsewhere provided the main source of inspiration for the next generation of landscape painters such as Herri Met de Bles and Lucas Gassel and, ultimately, for those of the Brueghel family.

Here, the gently receding landscape, unobstructed by jutting cliffs or mountains, is more naturalistic than the core group of Patinir landscapes (for which see, for example, the Prado Rest on the flight, the Baptism in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna,  the Triptych with the Penitent St. Jerome in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Landscape with St. Jerome in the Louvre, Paris)³ and does not replicate, in any of its parts, any other known painting. This fact points firmly towards it being an invention that came out of Patinir´s studio, an enterprise which seems to have gone to efforts not to repeat landscape motifs from one work to another, something that other workshops in Antwerp were more guilty of. Unusually, the landscape is possibly based on a real view around Antwerp; indeed, the single tower rising from an otherwise unbroken city skyline in the right distance may possibly be inspired by, if not directly representative of, the south tower of Antwerp cathedral which at the time rose alone through the rooftops.

Looking closely at the details of the landscape, the trees are rendered with slightly less precision than those of the core group, but they are very similar to the trees in the background of these pictures, and to trees in other autograph Patinir pictures less carefully crafted. Furthermore the forms of buildings, waterways and mountains in the far distance are less solid here than in many Patinir pictures; they seem to dissolve more into paint.

On the other hand, the layering of sinuous hills in the middle ground, especially on the left side of the painting, and the building on the left in the forest, is very typical of the core group (for example the Prado´s Rest on the Flight). The building is made up of a combination of elements which are all combined in a way that carefully avoids symmetry. This is typical of the many small buildings that dot Patinir landscapes and its individuality is typical of the Patinir workshop.

The figures of the Virgin and child and their accoutrements were added by a different studio hand and, unlike the landscape, which is a unique creation, they are inspired by Patinir's own in his Rest on the Flight to Egypt in the Prado, although the Christ child is turned more towards his mother in the present work. The folds of the Virgin's mantle and headdress so closely match those of the Prado panel that the author of this painting must have had access to a stencil that reproduced these elements from the Prado painting. The present work is however much smaller than the Prado panel (121 by 171 cm) and thus either a reduction method was used, or the workshop already contained several stencils of different sizes for these elements. The basket, too, must be based on the same stencil used in other Patinir pictures. Such stencilling for staffage is characteristic of the method used in the Patinir workshop.

The author of this panel thus had access to the Patinir shop materials, but remains somewhat independent from the master. It fits well within the heterogeneous group of paintings attributed to Patinir and his shop (see, for example, the Rest on the Flight in Berlin),⁴ and it is certainly not inferior to some of them. This painting is closer than the Berlin painting to the core Patinir group, but, as pointed out, differences do remain with the pictures in that group.

We are grateful to Alejandro Vergara for his help in the cataloguing of this lot.

1.  See for example A. Vergara, Patinir, exhibition catalogue, Madrid 2007, p. 64, fig. 19.
2.  Ibid., pp. 182-193, cat. no. 5, and pp. 204-209, cat.no. 9, both reproduced.
3.  Ibid., p. 182ff, no. 5, p. 216ff, no. 11, p. 282ff, no. 19, p. 326ff, no. 24.
4.  Ibid., p. 176ff, no. 4.