1012 - Ambrosius Benson

Ambrosius Benson The Virgin and Child Oil on panel. 14.5 x 14.5 cm. Provenance Sotheby’s, London, 6.5.1925, lot 15. – Thos. Agnew and Sons Ltd., London. – Acquired there by Edith Stanton Newberry (1870–1956), Detroit. – John S. Newberry, Detroit. – Donated by him to the Grosse Pointe Memorial Church. - Sotheby’s, New York, 29.1.2015, lot 4. – Acquired there by A. Alfred Taubman (1924–2015). - Sotheby’s, New York, 27.1. 2016, lot 16. – Acquired there by the present owner. Literature The Burlington Magazine XLVII (1925), p. XVII. – G. Marlier: Ambrosius Benson et la peinture à Bruges au temps de Charles-Quint, Damme 1957, pp. 116, 297, no. 60. – M. J. Friedländer: Early Netherlandish Painting. The Antwerp Mannerists, vol. XI, New York / Washington 1974, p. 97, no. 260, ill. 170. No halo, nor any other overt sacred symbol, catches the eye of the viewer of this unusually small devotional image, which appears all the more precious precisely because of its size. Its message derives solely from the tender intimacy between mother and child: she gently holds him close with both hands, while the Child reaches softly for his mother's face; their cheeks touch, their gazes meet. From Max J. Friedländer (op. cit.) to today's leading specialists in sixteenth-century Flemish painting, Till-Holger Borchert and Peter van den Brink (cf. Sotheby's, New York, 2016), there is unanimous agreement on the attribution of this small masterpiece to Ambrosius Benson. Born in Lombardy and probably trained in Milan, Ambrosius Benson came to Bruges as a young man around 1518. He had the good fortune to be taken into the workshop of Gerard David. No other painter shaped his art more profoundly than the master of the 'Virgin and Child with Four Angels' in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 'Rest on the Flight into Egypt' in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Yet in this exceptionally fertile environment Benson soon developed into an independent artistic personality, and in retrospect he is regarded as a painter of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. From Bruges his works travelled far beyond the borders of the Low Countries to other parts of Europe; today they are represented in numerous major museums. As in many of his compositions, Benson brings the figures close to the picture plane, leaving little room for the background: a wooded landscape on the left, rolling hills on the right. There a narrow path winds up towards a chapel, along which a pilgrim or wayfarer approaches the church. Contemporary viewers could read this detail as a visual prompt to meditate on the course of their own lives, an invitation to follow Christ and lead a godly life (cf. R. L. Falkenburg: Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life, Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1988). In the same way, the apple held by the Child conveyed a hidden meaning to them: Christ as the new Adam and Redeemer from original sin. Given its small dimensions, the painting was presumably made for private devotion, possibly even as a small portable altarpiece. The Neo-Gothic frame dates from the nineteenth century and is probably English; the painting remained in England until it was sold at auction in London in 1925.