Master of the Female Half-Lengths

Anonymous sale (‘Property of a Private Collector’), New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 2011, lot 222, for $43,750;

Where acquired by the present owner.

This panel is typical of much of the work of the Master of the Female Half Lengths, who seems to have specialized in small scale paintings in a courtly style, depicting elegant women reading, writing or making music in intimate domestic settings. This anonymous artist, was named by Friedländer after a painting in the Harrach Collection in Schloss Rohrau, Austria, which depicts three young women singing and playing musical instruments in an interior.¹

Believed to be by one of the most successful and popular artists working in Antwerp in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the group of works traditionally given to this is now regarded to be in large part the product of a workshop, specializing particularly in half-length depictions of the Magdalene and elegantly dressed young ladies, stylistically close to the Bruges painters such as Adriaen Isenbrandt (c. 1485–1551) and Ambrosius Benson (late 15^th century–before 1550).

¹ M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. XII, Leiden 1975, p. 100, no. 106, reproduced pl. 45; https://rkd.nl/images/31629