Lot 123: Adriaen Isenbrandt (Antwerp? c.1500-1551 Bruges)

The Temptation
oil on panel
14 1/4 x 10 3/4 in. (35.9 x 27.3 cm.)

THE PROPERTY OF A FRENCH PRIVATE COLLECTOR

The composition derives from the outsides of the wings of Gossaert's celebrated Malvagna triptych (Palermo, Galleria Nazionale), which in turn comes out of Dürer's woodcut from the Small Passion series, published in 1511 and therefore providing a terminus post quem for Gossaert's altarpiece. This same element of the triptych, with different landscape backgrounds, was employed on two other occasions in works traditionally attributed to Isenbrandt: that formerly in the collection of Louise Crane, New York, and that in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (see M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, XI, Leiden and Brussels, 1974, pl. 122, nos. 145 and 145a). The central panel of Gossaert's work, representing The Virgin and Child Enthroned, was similarly repeated twice in works given to Isenbrandt: in the central panel of the triptych with the Trafalgar Galleries, London, in 1996; and in that (which also repeats the canopies on the insides of the wings) formerly in the Kaufmann collection, Berlin.

The whole nature of Isenbrandt's oeuvre was recently the subject of a critical essay by Jean C. Wilson (J.C. Wilson, 'Adriaen Isenbrant and the problem of his oeuvre', Oud Holland, 109, 1995, pp. 1-17). In it, Professor Wilson raised the problem that the entire body of paintings identified as being by Isenbrandt (over 500 works) is, in fact, a conglomeration of different artists' works that just reflect the homogeneity of compositional forms in Bruges in the fist half of the 16th century, as well as the considerable influence of Gerard David on his contemporaries. That problem had been raised as early as 1934, in Max Friedländer's criticism of Bodenhausen's 1905 list of fifty-three pictures as by Isenbrandt and his workshop (see M.J. Friedländer, Die altniederländische Malerei, XI, Leiden, 1934); but Friedländer then grouped those together, and expanded the list to 150 panels, using Isenbrandt's as an umbrellla name and noting that future scholars would need to 'disentangle this large store into several groups.' Unfortunately Professor Wilson's study is the first step towards that process, and attributions to Isenbrandt, including for the present work, should therefore now be regarded as representing a picture's belonging within what might be called the 'Isenbrandt group'.

Professor Wilson did, however, highlight a few paintings within that group as being works by the same hand and of particularly noteworthy quality. There being as yet no evidence that Isenbrandt himself was actually the author of any of the paintings of the so-called Isenbrandt group, she attributed her subsection to the 'Master of the Van de Velde Portraits'. It is perhaps important for the attribution of the present painting that she included as a work by the Master the ex-Kaufmann Virgin and Child Enthroned triptych, one of the above-mentioned 'Isenbrandt' paintings deriving from the Malvagna triptych, suggesting that the others - inclusing the present panel - should to some degree be connected to that hand as well.

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