Object data
oil on panel
support: height 101 cm × width 35.7 cm
Master of Alkmaar
c. 1515 - c. 1520
oil on panel
support: height 101 cm × width 35.7 cm
The support consists of two vertically grained oak planks (5 and 29.2 cm), 0.8 cm thick. The panel is trimmed along the upper edge, and a triangle measuring 15 by 22.5 cm was added at top left in order to form a rectangle. This addition consists of two vertical planks. Dendrochronology has shown that all the wood used for the support of the wing, including the addition, is from the same tree. The youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1479. The panel could have been ready for use by 1490, but a date in or after 1504 is more likely. The white ground was applied up to the edges of the painting. An underdrawing is not visible to the naked eye, nor could one be detected with infrared reflectography. The figures were reserved. A figure kneeling behind Mary Magdalen, and partly covered by her dress, never seems to have been painted in. The paint was applied precisely, with brown contour lines and white highlights, for example in the faces and hands. Infrared reflectography shows that the coat of arms on the reverse was shifted during the painting process to the left of its original position.
See SK-A-1188-A.
? Commissioned by a member of the Van Soutelande-van der Graft family, c. 1515, and placed near the family grave in St Bavokerk, Haarlem;1 …; Van Leyden Gael family, Leiden;2 ...; collection of the merchant Van Rossum du Chattel, Leiden;3 ...; sale, L.H. van der Hoop Tilanus, The Hague, June (?) 1885, fl. 251, to the museum;4 on loan to the Stedelijk Museum, Alkmaar, since December 2001
Object number: SK-A-1188-B
Copyright: Public domain
Master of Alkmaar (active in Haarlem and Alkmaar c. 1490-1510), attributed to
The Master of Alkmaar takes his name from the Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity dated 1504 (SK-A-2815; date on SK-A-2815-4), which remained in its original location in Alkmaar’s Laurenskerk until 1918. The mark on the first of the seven scenes, Feeding the Hungry, is probably that of the artist. Valentiner, followed by Van Gelder-Schrijver, Friedländer and Hoogewerff, attributed several rather heterogeneous paintings to this master. In addition to a few smaller pictures, they include two wings with donor’s portraits from an epitaph for the Van Soutelande family of Haarlem (SK-A-1188-A, SK-A-1188-B), and two wings of an altarpiece in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1307 and SK-A-1308). The provenance of The Seven Works of Charity and the donors of the epitaph have resulted in the artist being placed in the northern part of the province of Holland, most likely in Haarlem and/or Alkmaar.
Valentiner identified him with the Haarlem painter Cornelis Willemsz. Bruyn published a series of archival data and convincingly rejected that identification. Friedländer, Hoogewerff and others suggested the possibility that the Master of Alkmaar was the brother of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Cornelis Buys I, who is said to have been active as a painter in Alkmaar until his death in 1524. One argument against this is the mark on Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, which does not resemble the family mark of his son, Cornelis Buys II (c. 1500-45/46), which is identical to that of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen.5 The suggestion put forward in 1958 that the Master of Alkmaar was Pieter Gerritsz, a Haarlem painter who died in 1540 and who worked regularly in Egmond Abbey between 1515 and 1529, as well as for the St Laurenskerk in Alkmaar, is less plausible. Bruyn and Van Regteren Altena’s theory that the Master of Alkmaar was actually two brothers from Haarlem, Mourijn Simonsz (c. 1440/50-1509) and Claas Simonsz van Waterlant (c. 1440/50-1533), has been explored further in a recent study by Bangs, in which the master’s entire oeuvre has been allocated to them. The exceptionally rich trove of archival data shows that the brothers carried out a series of commissions between 1464 and 1505, which they often worked on together, and received payments for gilding and paintings, such as the work they did for the high altar of the St Bavokerk in 1485 and 1487, when they were expressly instructed to leave the portraits to another artist. This hypothesis, which lacks convincing corroboration, would mean that the Master of Alkmaar belonged to the same generation as Geertgen tot Sint Jans.
The master’s oeuvre, which was assembled in the early decades of the 20th century and described at length by Friedländer in 1932, is rather heterogeneous in style, and has hardly been subtracted from of added to by recent research. This is clear from the core works, the polyptych from which he takes his name and the fragmentary works in the Rijksmuseum. He had a remarkable talent for portraiture, as can be seen from the donors’ portraits of the Van Soutelande family of Haarlem (SK-A-1188-A, SK-A-1188-B). His figured pieces reveal him to have been an amiable, rather naive narrator whose works are of a craftsman-like nature but lack the quality of Haarlem predecessors or contemporaries like Geertgen tot Sint Jans and Jan Mostaert. The work of these two artists must have been a model for the master. His work can be dated between c. 1490 and c. 1510 on stylistic grounds.
References
Valentiner 1914, pp. 76-77, 201; Hirschmann 1919, pp. 88-91; Van Gelder-Schrijver 1930; Van Gelder-Schrijver 1931; Friedländer X, 1932, pp. 33-44, 125-26; Hoogewerff, II, 1937, pp. 347-87; Amsterdam 1958, pp. 89, 92; Bruyn 1966, pp. 197-217; ENP X, 1973, pp. 24-29, 73-75, 86, 90-91; Van Regteren Altena 1974; Snyder 1985, pp. 446-48; Bangs 1999
(J.P. Filedt Kok)
This panel and its companion, see SK-A-1188-A and fig. a, with portraits of donors were originally the wings of a memorial tablet, the centre panel of which is lost. Kneeling in the foreground of the left wing is a man in a suit of armour and tunic whose palm frond proclaims him to be a member of the Brotherhood of the Jerusalem Pilgrims. As such he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre.6 His wife kneels in the foreground of the right wing. Members of their family kneel behind them, including five nuns and a monk. The little girl in the red dress on the right wing appears to be a later addition, as does the second boy from the left shown in profile in the back row on the left wing. Both groups are behind prie-dieux on which there are open prayer books. They are accompanied by St James the Greater with his staff and pilgrim’s hat on the left wing and by Mary Magdalen with her jar of ointment on the right wing.
There are two coats of arms on the red cloths covering the prie-dieux, and they are repeated in trompe l’oeil form in niches on the outer wings. There are two other coats held by angels in the sky. The first pair was identified by Thierry de Bye Dólleman as the coats of Willem Jelysz van Soutelande (?-1515/16), councillor and Commissioner for Orphans in Haarlem, and his wife Kathrijn Willemsdr van der Graft (?-1490/91). One of their sons, Jelys (later Gillis) van Soutelande (c. 1490-1547), is probably the man immediately behind his father.7 Thierry de Bye Dólleman also identified the coats of arms in the sky. The one on the left with a decapitated silver lion is that of the prominent Haarlem citizen Jacob de Wael van Rozenburg (?-1524), while the one on the right wing is supposedly that of the Van der Graft family. However, on the basis of the left-hand coat it can be identified as that of Jacob de Wael’s wife, Margriet van Waveren, whose family bore the same arms as the Van der Grafts.8 The second couple are not depicted on the wings, but it is very possible that they were on the lost centre panel.9 A similar construction is found in the memorial tablet for the Van Noordwijk family in Bonn which Jan Mostaert painted around 1514 (fig. b). The donors Anna van Noordwijk and Gijsbrecht van Duivenvoorde are portrayed on the wings, while Anna’s parents and grandparents are on the centre panel.10
If the coats of arms on the Amsterdam wings are not later additions, and provided Thierry de Bye Dólleman’s identification is correct, there may have been blood ties between the Van Soutelande and De Wael van Rozenburg families, because it was unusual to depict unrelated families together in a memorial tablet.11 All we know, however, is that Jacob de Wael and Willem van Soutelande were both members of the Haarlem Brotherhood of the Jerusalem Pilgrims. Their names appear on a list below the group portrait of the members painted by Jan van Scorel around 1528/30.12
When the Rijksmuseum panels were bought in 1885 it was already suspected that they were by the same artist as the ‘painter of the works of charity in Alkmaar’.13 Van Gelder-Schrijver and Friedländer included them in the master’s oeuvre, although the latter found the panels rather coarsely executed.14 Hoogewerff, who identified the artist as Cornelis Buys I, regarded them as workshop products.15 Despite the fact that they are portraits, the use of colour and the detailing of the figures are very reminiscent of the Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, the Master of Alkmaar’s core work. The coarseness that Friedländer and Hoogewerff saw relative to the Charity panels is not apparent to us. The draughtsman-like brushwork and the elaboration of details, such as the outlined eyelids, the firmly painted noses and the marked drapery folds all point to the hand of the Master of Alkmaar and justify the attribution to him.
The way in which the flowing landscapes are painted cannot be assessed against the Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity because of its urban setting. Although Bangs and Van Suchtelen suggested that the landscapes may have been painted by another artist, they are very comparable to those in the Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi (SK-C-1364) and in the two wings with The High Priest Refusing Joachim’s Sacrifice and The Meeting of Joachim and Anna under the Golden Gate in Haarlem, both of which are convincingly attributed to the Master of Alkmaar.16
Although the dendrochronology indicates that the panels could have been ready for use by 1490, a date around 1516 is more likely, given the suspected portrait of the son of the Soutelande-van der Graft family. Jelys van Soutelande, who was born around 1490, must be at least 20 or older in the painting. He may have commissioned the memorial tablet after his father’s death in 1515/16. If that was the case, the Master of Alkmaar’s style does not seem to have developed since 1504.
As Thierry de Bye Dólleman pointed out, the triptych could have been placed over an altar near the family grave in St Bavo’s in Haarlem.17 It is conceivable that the centre panel was lost in the Iconoclasm or later, and that the wings ended up back in the family. In any case, it is likely that they then served as family portraits. The panels were then sawn down, with the sawn-off pieces being reused to make the panels rectangular. It was probably at an early date that they were put into the single frame they had when the museum bought them.18 The memorial tablet by Mostaert mentioned above (fig. b) might indicate the original shape of the wings.
(J. Niessen)
See SK-A-1188-A
See SK-A-1188-A
J. Niessen, 2010, 'Meester van Alkmaar, Right wing of a memorial tablet with nine female portraits, probably Kathrijn Willemsdr van der Graft (?-1490/91) and family, with Mary Magdalen (inner wing), and the coats of arms of the Van der Grafts in alliance with the Van Soutelandes (outer wing), c. 1515 - c. 1520', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9046
(accessed 10 November 2024 00:40:28).