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

T.E. Twisden, 1869 (as by Lambert Lombard);
Thence by descent to Sir John Twisden Bt., Bradbourne, East Malling, Kent;
His sale, London, Christie's, 13 June 1938, lot 174 (as van Orley);
With Koetser, London, 1938;
Ernst Schwarz, New York, circa 1950-59;
Anonymous sale, London Christie's, 26 June 1959, lot 34, £1,800 to Lunde;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 24 November 1961, lot 132 (as The Master of Frankfurt) £2,000 to Pearson.

Canterbury, Exhibition of Old Masters from Houses in Kent, 1932 (according to a label on the reverse);
Indianapolis, John Herron Art Museum, Holbein and his Contemporaries, 1950, no. 40.

W. Valentiner, "Jan de Vos, the Master of Frankfort", in The Art Quarterly, Summer 1945, pp. 207, 212, reproduced p. 203;
P. Vanaise, "De Meester van Watervliet en Zijn Nood Gods", in Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique Bulletin, Brussels 1966, vol. IX, pp. 26-27;
N. Veronee-Verhaegen, "Arenberg 'Lamentation' in the Detroit Institute of Arts", in Arts Quarterly, vol. XXV, 1962, pp. 304, 311, n. 23;
M.J. Friedländer,  Early Netherlandish Painting, Leiden and Brussels 1971, vol. VII, p. 96, note 150;
B. Frederiksen, "A Flemish Deposition of circa 1500 and its relation to Rogier's Lost Composition", in The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, vol. 9, 1981, p. 141;
S.H. Goddard, The Master of Frankfurt and his Shop, unpublished Thesis, University of Iowa, 1983, pp. 414-5, no. 105;
S.H. Goddard, "The Master of Frankfurt and his Shop", in Verhandlingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Weteschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie, vol. 46, Brussels 1984, no. 38.

The composition of this picture repeats with some differences that of the central panel of the altarpiece of The Deposition now in the Church of  Notre-Dame, Watervliet (see M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, Brussels 1971, vol. VII, pp. 84-85,  Add. 202, reproduced plate 321). This was long considered by Friedländer and others (see Literature) to be a work by the Master of Frankfurt, the head of one of the largest Antwerp workshops at the beginning of the 16th century. The composition of the present panel broadly follows that of the Watervliet altarpiece, but the landscape is much changed, and the arrangement of most of the figures around the body of Christ also quite different; the presumed self-portrait of the artist shown on the extreme right of the original altarpiece is also omitted. More recently, however, Vanaise and then Goddard (see Literature), have identified the artist as one of three separate hands, all active in the workshop of the Master of Frankfurt but distinct from the Master himself, and named him the Watervliet painter after his eponymous work. The present painting is one of four different versions or variants of part or all of the Watervliet altarpiece, all of which Goddard (op. cit., pp. 158-160, nos. 105-109) assigns to the larger workshop of the Master of Frankfurt. He suggests a dating of circa 1515 for the Watervliet altarpiece itself and a slightly later dating of around 1520 for the present work.