SCHOOL OF BRUGES, CIRCA 1530-40 | A Triptych:Central panel: The Assumption of the VirginWings: The Annunciation and The Adoration of the Magi (recto)with Saints Sebastian and Anne holding the Virgin and Child en grisaille (verso)

Don Félix Fernández Valdés (d. 1975), Bilbao;
Thence by descent to the present owner.

The three panels have a degree of wear throughout. There are small but extensive retouchings throughout probably to mask some flaking (mostly going with the grain of the panels). There are some areas of more significant losses, where the surface has been reconstructed by the sgrafitto technique - these areas include parts of the drapery in the central kneeling figures red cloak, and the figures at the far left and far right. Another area of more concentrated retouching is throughout the sky of the central panel. All this restoration seems quite old, and although seemingly quite well executed is now discoloured and mostly visible to the naked eye. The well preserved passages, such as the figure of Christ and His Father in the heavens, and the yellow drapery of the angel, are very beautifully preserved. There is some underdrawing visible where the paint has thinned somewhat. The grisaille reverses have scattered spot retouchings but are in overall good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Hitherto unrecorded, this highly detailed triptych was almost certainly painted in Bruges in the southern Netherlands in the first half of the sixteenth century, for its author was clearly familiar with the work of that city's most famous painters of this period, Gerard David (1460–1523) and his pupil Adriaen Isenbrant (1490–1551). The overall design of the central panel here is, for example, clearly related to the Triptych of the Assumption of the Virgin today in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, which was probably painted by Isenbrant to a design by David, although the latter's participation is not excluded by some scholars.¹ Here the painter has changed the design, leaving only the Holy Trinity within the colourful mandorla, and has brought the Virgin Mary and four attendant angels closer and into the physical space above the apostles. The clarity that this brings to the composition and the subject matter epitomises David's sense of design, and stands in marked contrast with more mystical renderings of the subject, such as the Bruges Master of the Saint Lucy Legend's spectacular Mary, Queen of Heaven of around 1485–1500 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The beautiful open landscape which helps bind the scene is typical of Isenbrant's work, and may be paralleled, for example, in his Virgin and Child and saints in a landscape today in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.² The figures in the present triptych, however, lack both the distinctive sfumato modelling that is so characteristic of Isenbrant's work, and the monumentality and sympathy for individual character that is so in evidence in the Cluny altarpiece. Their style combines a number of different strands of influence within the Bruges school, from the work of Jan Provoost (1462–1525) and Gerard David to that of Isenbrant and to a lesser extent the Lombard Ambrosius Benson (c.1495–1550) who became a Master in Bruges in 1519. The design seems also to have influenced the Antwerp painter Marcellus Coffermans (1520–75), whose own signed Assumption of the Virgin of 1562 in the Art Institute of Chicago echoes many of its features.

The subject of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is taken not from scripture, but from Jacobus da Voragine's Golden Legend, the most important of the texts that appeared with the cult of the Virgin in the thirteenth century. This recounts the apocryphal story of how Christ came to the Apostles as they sat beside the Virgin's tomb, together with St. Michael who brought and restored Mary's soul to her body: 'And anon the soul came again to the body of Mary, and issued gloriously out of the tomb, and thus was received in the heavenly chamber, and a great company of angels with her.'

Don Félix Fernandez Valdés was a passionate art collector, and assembled one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings in Spain during the mid-20th century, which was housed at his home in Gran Via in Bilbao in northern Spain. Among his acquisitions were Murillo's Saint Joseph and the Christ Child sold in these Rooms on 4 December 2013, and Francisco de Zurbaran's Saint Anthony Abbot, today in the Fondo Cultural Villar Mir Collection in Madrid.  

1 P. Lorentz, 'Adrien Isenbrant (et Gérard?): le triptyque de l'Assomption de la Vierge', in Revue du Louvre, vol. 54, 2004, no. 5, pp. 16–18.
2 M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. XI, Leyden and Brussels 1974, p. 88, no. 184, reproduced pl. 137.