Lot 19: ATTRIBUTED TO GILLIS COIGNET THE ELDER

ATTRIBUTED TO GILLIS COIGNET THE ELDER ANTWERP 1542 - 1599 HAMBURG THE ASSYRIAN CAMP AT NIGHT, WITH JUDITH BEHEADING HOLOFERNES IN HIS TENT oil on panel, within a painted tondo, the spandrels in faux-marbre , unframed (overall) 24.7 by 24.6 cm.

Coignet was famed for his depictions of night scenes in his own day, as Van Mander records: 'He also had a subtle way of painting night scenes very inventively'. Though painted on a completely different scale to the present work, night scenes by Coignet such as his Drawing of the lottery for the Amsterdam asylum in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum and Judith showing the head of Holofernes to the men of Bethulia painted in 1593, with Stradanus B.V.B.A., Antwerp,υ1 support at least a tentative attribution of this picture to him.

1. See H. Miedema (ed.), Karel van Mander. The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, vol. V, Doornspijk 1998, reproduced figs. 4 and 5.