Ambrosius Benson

Heinrich Vieweg, Braunschweig (d. 1890);

By whose heirs sold, Berlin, Rudolph Lepke, 18 March 1930, lot 43, for 7,000 Reichsmark;

With Matthiesen Gallery, London, 1938;

With Frederick (Adolf Fritz) Mont (Mondschein), United States, certainly by January 1939 but probably before 1938;

With K.W. Bachstitz, The Hague, inv./cat. no. Ru1419a, 1949;

Private collection, Johannesburg, by 1974;

Thence by descent.

G. Marlier, Ambrosius Benson et la peinture à Bruges au temps de Charles-Quint, Damme 1957, pp. 109 and 299, no. 65, reproduced pl. XVII;

M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. XI, Leiden and Brussels 1974, p. 96, no. 258, reproduced pl. 169.

Ambrosius Benson was one of the most popular and prolific artists of the Northern Renaissance, who combined the softer sensibility of the art of his north Italian origins with the precision and delicacy of his Netherlandish contemporaries. Benson was born in Lombardy, but is recorded in Bruges as early as 1518, and he became a master in the city's guild of painters the following year. Benson was working in Bruges at a time of great artistic development and collaboration, alongside figures including Gerard David (1460–1523), whose studio he entered in 1518, Adriaen Isenbrandt (1480–1551), who may be regarded as Benson's chief competitor, and the miniaturist and illuminator, Simon Bening (1483–1561).

A number of treatments of this popular subject by Benson suggest the use of preparatory cartoons, reused for different iterations. The present composition comes closest to, though does not exactly replicate, two other half-length versions of varying dimensions of the Virgin and Child standing half-length, with a landscape beyond: that in The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Connecticut,¹ and that recorded in the Felix Fostel collection, Switzerland in 1974, formerly in the Baare collection, Godesberg.² These in turn share their design with other iterations of the figures in different settings; Marlier comments particularly on the finessed beauty of the landscape here, as being 'de fort belle qualité' (see Literature).

Marlier dates the present painting to circa 1528, between the Virgin and Child recorded in the De Pret collection, Schoten, Vordensteyn, which originally formed the central section of a triptych, in which the Madonna is shown at three-quarter-length seated before a distant landscape, dated by Marlier to 1520–25,³ and the Fostel/Baare Virgin already mentioned, which he places just slightly later than the present work, 1528–29; both these paintings depict the Virgin holding an apple in her right hand, which does not appear here, but of the three, this Virgin is the only one to wear a diaphanous veil.

The conceit of the Virgin offering her breast to the Child ultimately derives from Rogier van der Weyden and through further examples by David, but the way in which the Child raises His hands to the Virgin's chest while turning towards the viewer, combines the influences of Van Eyck and the Master of Flémalle, and is a motif that likewise recurs in the works of Isenbrandt; see, for example, the small triptych in St. Salvator's Cathedral, Bruges.⁴ While the earlier, De Pret painting shares more in common with the work of earlier Northern artists like Memling, the Fostel/Baare Virgin and this panel are much more Italianate.

Note on Provenance

The painting's whereabouts in the late 1930s are largely due to the annotations on photographs from the archive of Max Friedländer, now recorded at the RKD, which note ownership by Mondschein in January 1939, and Matthiesen in July 1939. References to the painting being with Matthiesen in 1938 appear in the Literature and other sources, however, and the dates in Friedländer's notes would appear to refer to his annotations, rather than the provenance itself. It may therefore be possible that Mondschein had the painting in America before 1939, and possibly even before Matthiesen handled it in 1938. Adolf Friedrich Mondschein (1894–1994) ran the Galerie Sankt Lucas in Vienna and emigrated to New York, where he anglicised his name to become better known as Frederick Mont.

¹ https://rkd.nl/explore/images/63022

² Friedländer 1974, p. 96, no. 257, reproduced pl. 169.

³ Marlier 1974, pp. 106–08, no. 10A, reproduced pl. XV.

⁴ https://rkd.nl/explore/images/45186