Southern Netherlandish, Hainaut, first half of the 16th century

European private collection, acquired in the 1980s

These moving figures of the Virgin and Saint John from a Crucifixion find a close stylistic parallel in a pair of figures of the same subjects in the church of Eccles in the Avesnes region (Steyaert, op. cit., figs. 65a-b). Characterised by slender, elongated forms and a 'sharply "cracked" fold above the knee of the advanced leg' (ibid., pp. 251-252), the Eccles Virgin and Saint John have been associated by John Steyaert with an unknown workshop in Southern Hainaut, which is also thought to be responsible for a pair of similar figures sold at Sotheby's London on 12 December 1985 (lot 63), as well as being related to the probably earlier Crucifixion group in the Parish church of Marpent (ibid., no. 65). Both the Marpent and the Sotheby's Virgins display the same inclined posture and positioning of the hands as the Virgin of the present group, corroborating its likely origin within this milieu or workshop.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. W. Steyaert, Late Gothic Sculpture in the Burgundian Netherlands, Ghent, 1994, pp. 250-252