Lot 18: Marten de Vos (Antwerp 1532-1603)

The Gathering of Manna signed and dated 'M: DE.VOS :F.1602 :' (lower right) oil on panel 211/4 x 29 in. (54 x 73.7 cm.) PROVENANCE Anon. Sale, Christie's, London, 27 May 1931, one of a pair (see below). Dr. E.F. Schapiro, London. LITERATURE H. Gerson and E.H. ter Kuile, Art and Architecture in Belgium, 1600-1800, London, 1960, p. 62. L. van Puyvelde, La Peinture flamande au siŠcle de Bosch et Breughel, Paris, 1962, p. 382. A. Zweite, Marten de Vos als Maler, Berlin, 1980, p. 320, no. 107, fig. 136. EXHIBITION London, Royal Academy of Arts, Flemish Exhibition, 1953-4, no. 262. Manchester, City Art Gallery, Exhibition of European Art (1520-1600), 9 March-6 April 1965, no. 241. NOTES Together with the brothers Ambrosius I and Frans Francken I, de Vos ranks among the most important painters of altarpieces in Antwerp during the late-sixteenth century. In 1558, he was enrolled as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, where he spent most of his life, but for possibly travelling to Italy in the 1550s or 1560s. His work is highly eclectic - he borrowed motifs and figures from Michelangelo, Veronese, and Tintoretto, as well as his Flemish contemporaries Pieter Aertsen and Frans Floris. He was also a prolific draughtsman and hundreds of prints were made after his drawings. His Moses showing the Israelites the Tablets of the Law of 1575 (Mauritshuis, The Hague, on loan to the Catherijnenconvent, Utrecht), which includes a self-portrait, is considered one of his masterpieces. The date of 1602 makes the present picture one of the artist's last works. It was originally one of a pair with an Abraham and Melchisedek, and was sold with that work in the 1931 Christie's sale. Both subjects relate to the Last Supper: Melchisedek brought bread and wine to Abraham, an action regarded as prefiguring that of Christ; the connection with the present work derives from Christ's parable of the Bread of Life, as recounted in the Gospel of Saint John, VI: 24-58. Both paintings belong to a group of cabinet pictures painted by de Vos towards the end of his life, and including the Apollo and the Muses in the Mus‚es Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.