Workshop of The Master of Frankfurt

The Madonna enthroned outdoors

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Lot Closed

July 8, 01:09 PM GMT

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

The Property of a Family

Workshop of The Master of Frankfurt

active in Frankfurt circa 1480 - 1520

The Madonna enthroned outdoors

oil on oak panel

unframed: 68.5 x 47 cm.; 27 x 18½ in.

With Kunsthandel P. de Boer, Amsterdam, 1964, from whom most likely acquired by Willy Kaus, Frankfurt;
Thence by inheritance to the present owners.

Florence, 1963, no. 51 (according to Goddard, 1984, who could find no catalogue mentioning it);
Amsterdam, P. de Boer, 1964, no. 21.

S.H. Goddard, The Master of Frankfurt and his shop, doctoral diss., University of Iowa 1983, pp. 354-55 and 476, cat. no. 36, reproduced fig. 66 (as Workshop of The Master of Frankfurt);
S.H. Goddard, The Master of Frankfurt and his shop, Brussels 1984, p. 139, cat. no. 36, (as Workshop of the Master of Frankfurt, circa 1510-15).

The Master of Frankfurt, a productive but as yet anonymous artist whose workshop was active in Antwerp between circa 1490 and 1520.¹ He was named by M.J. Friedländer after two works now in Frankfurt: the Saint Anne Altarpiece in the Historisches Museum and Humbracht Triptych in the Städel, around which a corpus of work was assembled by Friedländer and refined by Stephen Goddard, but there is no suggestion that the artist had any historical association with the city.

Stephen Goddard noted that this is a version dating from circa 1510-15 of an autograph work by the Master of Frankfurt dating from circa 1509 which has been in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, since 1856.² The figures of the Virgin and Child, including her robes and the baldacchino under which she is enthroned are the same, and presumably derived from a common cartoon, but the landscape backgrounds are completely different, and are presumably by different landscape specialists in the Frankfurt Master's workshop.

¹ A suggestion made by Julius Held in 1949 that the Master should be identified as Hendrik van Wueluwe (active Antwerp 1483-1528) has been much discussed over the last seventy years, and not dismissed by Stephen Goddard (1984, pp. 33-5, 42-51).

²Inv. 134, oil on panel, 87 x 63 cm. See Goddard, 1984, p. 139, cat. no. 33, reproduced fig. 30; https://rkd.nl/explore/images/38445. Several other variants are known.