Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen Oostsanen circa 1470 - 1533 Amsterdam

Private collection, Germany;
Bought by the present owner.....

The sitter was in several years elected Burgomaster of Alkmaar, and in 1490 assumed the Office of Guardian of the fortifications at Nieuwburg in Oudorp that had been built by Graf Floris V.  He died on 25 March 1523 and is buried  in the Groote Kerk in Alkmaar, where his gravestone bears the same armorial crest that surmounts the present portrait: of the Egmond and Heerman van Oegstgeest families.  His sister Jodoca van Egmond van Nijenborgh and her husband Augustijn van Teylingen are portrayed as donors in Van Oostsanen's triptych of the Virgin and Child in Berlin, Gemäldegalerie.

This portrait appears to have been unknown to Jane Louise Carroll when she compiled a catalogue raisonné of Oostsanen's paintings as part of her doctoral dissertation submitted in 1987 (J.L. Carroll, The paintings of Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen (1472?-1533), Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987).  Carroll lists three other versions, all very similar (idem, pp. 272-6, nos. 33-35): in Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; in Paris, Musée du Louvre; and in a private collection, last seen in public with Colnaghi, London, in 1980-1.  The latter picture would appear to be very similar to the present one, and is also cut off at the top, but is slightly larger.  Carroll dates them all circa 1518, while scholars before him have suggested earlier dates: Hoogewerff thought no later than 1510, Friedländer suggested circa 1513, and Belonje circa 1515.  Carroll's suggestion that the architectural framework and roughly-painted distant landscape in the other versions are the work of workshop assistants, would also seem to be the case here.