Adriaen Isenbrant

Bruges, Groeningemuseum, Hans Memling, August-November 1994, no. 94.

C. Périer-d’Ieteren, 'Un tableau inédit d’Adriaen Isenbrant : une Vierge et Enfant trônant et la copie interprétative', in Revue d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, no. 58, Brussels 1989, pp. 5-21, fig. 1.

This important Virgin and Child, until now in a private collection and never seen on the art market, was rediscovered and published for the first time by Catheline Périer-d’Ieteren, in a very precise and well researched study. Exhibited shortly after, during the major retrospective devoted to Hans Memling, it perfectly illustrates the master’s persistent influence on painting in Bruges in the early sixteenth century.

The present work – probably the central panel of a triptych that has been dismembered – is crucial, in the view of Périer-d’Ieteren, for an understanding of the relationship between Isenbrant and Memling, and for a better grasp of the context in which ‘interpretative copies’ were made, forming a large part of artistic production in Bruges. It reprises the Virgin and Child by Memling in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (Staatische Museen Berlin; Gemäldegalerie; inv. GG 529), which was itself painted in about 1475 to 1480. Isenbrant has changed the composition’s background, which in Memling’s painting was occupied by a loggia opening onto a landscape, but very faithfully preserves the figures of the Virgin and Christ, as well as the vase of lilies in the foreground on the right. Instead of the loggia, he places the Virgin in an enclosed architectural space, in the shape of a richly sculpted apse. In the words of Périer-d’Ieteren: ‘By changing the setting of the image and using a new formal vocabulary consisting of Italianising ornamental motifs […], Isenbrant modernizes a composition with an archaicizing character, through his borrowing from Memling’ (Périer-d’Ieteren, op. cit., p. 8; our translation).

Laboratory analyses undertaken at the time of the 1989 article revealed that Isenbrant used a perforated cartoon as a template so as to reproduce the figures of the Virgin and Child with perfect accuracy. Additionally, the analyses confirmed that the colours are the same in both works, suggesting that Isenbrant had been able to examine Memling’s painting at first hand: ‘the chromatic examination of the composition shows that the same distribution of colours was used, faithful to Memling’s painting, down to the last details. […] This appears to prove that Isenbrant copied Memling’s painting itself rather than a simple fragmentary drawing and that he probably made the perforated cartoon directly on top of the original work in order to reproduce, among other elements, the unusual model of the Child. The measurements of the two groups of figures coincide, adding weight to this hypothesis.’ (Périer-d’Ieteren, op. cit., p. 14; our translation).

These factors make this work a prototype in Isenbrant’s oeuvre. It would be followed by other versions, by his hand or by his workshop (see in particular the version sold, with its side panels, at Christie’s Paris on 11 June 2025, lot 5).

Catheline Périer-d’Ieteren dates this Virgin and Child to about 1510–1520, in other words shortly after Isenbrant had settled in Bruges, demonstrating the artist’s determination to make his mark on the city’s artistic landscape by using models created by the most famous painter in Bruges at that time.