1001 - Goossen van der Weyden und Werkstatt

Goossen van der Weyden und Werkstatt Goossen van der Weyden and workshop Madonna of the Rosary with Two Donors and Saints Dominic and Francis Oil on panel (parquetted). 185 x 154 cm. Provenance Art Market, Brussels, before 1913. – Permanent loan to the Kolumba, art museum of the archdiocese, Cologne, until 2025. – In German private collection for several generations. Literature G. Hulin de Loo: Ein authentisches Werk von Goossen van der Weyden im Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. Die gleichzeitigen Gemälde aus Tongerloo und Lier und die Ursprünge der Antwerpener Schule um 1500, in: Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, XXXIV (1913), pp. 59-88, here pp. 87f. and ill. 10 (as Goossen van der Weyden, workshop). - C. Bauman: A Rosary Picture with a View of the Park of the Ducal Palace in Brussels, Possibly by Goswijn van der Weyden, in: Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989), pp. 135–51, here pp. 146–147 and ill. 9 (as Goossen van der Weyden, workshop). Floating lightly above the clouds, a life-sized Virgin on the Crescent Moon appears in the heavens, surrounded by a radiant wreath of red and white roses. Crowned Queen of Heaven, she holds the lively Christ Child on her arm and a white rose in her hand, and is venerated by two donors who kneel on the heights of a sweeping coastal landscape, before whose animated shore several ships pass. With Saints Dominic (l.) and Francis (r.) as intercessors behind them, both donors had themselves depicted by the Flemish painter Goossen van der Weyden in devout adoration before a 'Virgin of the Rosary' — in the Antwerp of the time an exotic and unusual iconography, pointing strongly to cultural exchange with the Iberian Peninsula. Goossen was the grandson of the revolutionary Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400–1464), whose religious imagery and tender Madonna types continued to exert considerable influence on artistic taste throughout Europe long after his death. In the present altarpiece his grandson Goossen combined a graceful Madonna, drawing on models by his grandfather and his father Pieter (c. 1437–1484), with an extraordinary arrangement of flowers. Particularly striking is the wreath of blossoms in the hair of the left-hand donor (who in turn holds another form of the rosary in his hands) as well as the radiant roses around the Madonna in her mandorla. Together with the two mendicant saints, Dominic and Francis, these figures appear in comparable form on an earlier Spanish engraving by Brother Francisco Doménech (c. 1445–1494) of 1488 (ill. 1). The engraving must have found its way to the Brussels Habsburg court at roughly the same time as the present painting was created, where a small rosary altarpiece came into being (ill. 2) that was long likewise attributed to Goossen van der Weyden (1515–20, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 1987.290.3a–p; cf. Bauman, op. cit., and Ainsworth, op. cit.). On Goossen's retable, Saint Dominic de Guzmán (c. 1170–1221) appears as a further Flemish a special case with his attribute of a dog carrying a burning torch ('domini canis' — 'Hound of the Lord'), who hailed from Caleruega near Burgos; while Saint Francis, too, carries the crucifix of his stigmata before him in a manner that recalls not Flemish but Spanish representations. Goossen first continued the successful family workshop in Brussels before later establishing himself in the flourishing international trading city of Antwerp as a painter and several times Dean of the Guild of St Luke. The characteristic Antwerp world landscape visible in the background, in the manner of Joachim Patinir (c. 1485–1524), with its merchant (?) ships, offers a hint of this. From Antwerp, numerous contacts and works led him to the Iberian Peninsula. Among his apprentices, Goossen employed at various times the Portuguese Simon Portugaloys (1504–05) and the Spaniard Allonse Crasto (1522–23); Portugaloys may have served as an intermediary for a triptych destined for the Poor Clares convent of Madre de Deus in Xabregas in eastern Lisbon, commissioned for its founder Eleanor of Portugal or for King Manuel I (now Museu de Arte Antiga, Lisbon; cf. Campbell, op. cit., pp. 688–689 and Koopstra, op. cit., p. 252). Further works, such as the exterior panels of a lost large altarpiece now in the National Gallery, London (inv. nos. NG 1082 and NG 1084), passed from Goossen's workshop probably directly to Spanish or Portuguese clients (cf. Campbell, op. cit., p. 702), and even on the island of Madeira, in the Museu de Arte Sacra in Funchal, there is a large 'Adoration of the Magi' that was most likely made for a local church (cf. ibid. and exh. cat. Feitorias, op. cit., pp. 110–111, no. 32). Nothing is yet known about the two patrons of the Virgin of the Rosary, who kneel in the picture wearing fur-trimmed mantles and armour. What the painting does tell us is that Goossen van der Weyden created for them an altarpiece as monumental as it is exceptional — one that brings together the Early Netherlandish tradition of his celebrated grandfather with the modern Antwerp style and foreign, Iberian elements. When the art historian Georges Hulin de Loo published his groundbreaking essay on Goossen van der Weyden in 1913, the present painting served him — alongside the famous 'Gift of Kalmhout' in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (inv. no. 526) — as one of the key reference points for establishing the artist and his workshop. The illustration in his publication (ill. 3) reveals that the painting, which at that time had come 'a few years earlier from the art trade in Brussels, from German private ownership' (Hulin de Loo, op. cit., p. 86), was at some point after the photograph was taken altered by restoration interventions, which in all likelihood consisted largely of later overpaintings. We are grateful to Prof. Dr Didier Martens, Brussels, and Dr Till-Holger Borchert, Aachen, for kindly confirming the attribution of the work on the basis of high-resolution photographs. Referenced Literature G. Hulin de Loo: Ein authentisches Werk von Goossen van der Weyden im Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. Die gleichzeitigen Gemälde aus Tongerloo und Lier und die Ursprünge der Antwerpener Schule um 1500, in: Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, XXXIV (1913), pp. 59–88, here p. 87f. – G. C. Bauman: A Rosary Picture with a View of the Park of the Ducal Palace in Brussels, Possibly by Goswijn van der Weyden, in: Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989), pp. 135–51. – R. Carita: Aanbidding der Wijzen, Antwerpse Atelier, c. 1518, in: exh. cat. Feitorias. Kunst in Portugal ten tijde van de Grote Ontdekkingen (einde 14de eeuw tot 1548), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen 1991, ed. by Maria da Conceiçao Amaral, Antwerp 1991, cat. no. 32, pp. 110–111. – L. Campbell: Goossen van der Weyden, in: The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings: With French Paintings before 1600. National Gallery Catalogues, ed. by id., London 2014, pp. 188–189. – Idem.: Workshop of Goossen van Weyden, The Visitation of the Virgin to Saint Elizabeth and The Flight into Egypt, in: The Sixteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings: With French Paintings before 1600. National Gallery Catalogues, ed. by id., London 2014, pp. 691–702. – M. W. Ainsworth: Netherlandish (Brussels) Painter, The Fifteen Mysteries and the Virgin of the Rosary, in: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection Online, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437216, accessed 7 October 2025, 2011 [2022], n.p. – Anna Koopstra: Goossen Van der Weyden en zijn werkplaats, in: exh. cat. Zot van Dimpna. Acht panelen vol passie, lef en rebellie, ed. by Sven van Dorst. Sint-Dimphnakerk, Geel 2020. Veurne, 2020, pp. 250–261. For comparative illustrations, see the printed catalogue as well as the PDF version.