(Mühlbrecht 1558–1617 Haarlem)
The Virgin and Child with Angels,
signed with a monogram and dated lower center: HG (ligated)/A. 1607,
inscribed on the reverse: D H Gultius,
oil on canvas, 133.4 x 100.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
(possibly) estate of Augustinus Alstenus Blomaert (1585–1659), Haarlem (‘een stuck schilderije van Goltius vande gerboorte Christi’);
(probably) collection of Father Luc(e)y, South County, Dublin, Ireland, before 1957/61;
from whom purchased by Rudolf Holzapfel, jr (1938–2005);
from whom purchased by Eugen Brüschwiler, Munich, circa 1961;
by descent to Wolfgang (1910–1989) and Brigitte Schöne, Hamburg;
sale, Christies, London, 19 July 1999, lot 42

Literature:
(possibly) G. Rathgeber, Annalen der niederländischen Malerei, Formschneide- und Kupferstecherkunst, Gotha 1844, p. 393, cat. no. 2825 (Maria mit dem Christuskind);
J. Müller Hofstede, A Madonna and Child and Angels of 1607 by Hendrick Goltzius, in: The Burlington Magazine, April 1970, vol. CXII, no. 805, pp. 232–35, figs. 44, 46 and 47;
L. W. Nichols, Job in Distress, A Newly-discovered Painting by Hendrick Goltzius, in: Simiolus, 1983, vol. 13, no. 3/4, p. 182, note 2;
X. S. Egorova, A Painting by Hendrick Goltzius at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, in: The Burlington Magazine, January 1989, vol. CXXXI, no. 1030, p. 26;
M. Senenko, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of Dutch Paintings, XVIII–XIX Centuries, Moscow 2009, p. 156;
L. W. Nichols, The Paintings of Hendrick Goltzius 1558–1617, A Monograph and Catalogue Raisonné, Doornspijk 2013, pp. 57, 64, 103, 114, 116, and pp. 105/66, cat. no. A-12, pl. 12

The present lot depicts a nocturnal nativity scene by Hendrick Goltzius, who as a printmaker was perhaps the most renowned artist of what is now seen as the early Dutch Golden Age. Drawing on a tradition in Northern painting stretching back at least as far as Geerten Tot Sint Jans’s Nativity at Night of 1490 (National Gallery, inv. no. NG 1481) the present Madonna and Child with Angels is laden with the contemporary Catholic Counter-Reformation visual themes of the Eucharist and the metaphor of Christ as light.

The subtle brush work of Goltzius picks out both the loose kernels of corn that jut out from beneath Christ’s manger and, at the right-hand margin, a wheat-sheaf, evoking John 6:51, ‘I am the living bread which came down from heaven.’ Three divine lights sources are also present. In the background, beneath a crumbling archway – a symbol of Christ’s destruction of the old religions - reclining shepherds gaze up at a heavenly illumination in delicate impasto. Before turning to painting in 1600, Goltzius, had engraved in 1598/99 an unfinished chiaroscuro scene of the Adoration of the Shepherds (Metropolitan Museum, inv. no. 17.3.492, see fig. 1) but in the present lot the artist gives the foreground to Mary. She is lit by divine rays of light that burst forth from the top left of the picture. Goltzius boldly renders Mary’s drapery. The delicateness of Mary’s touch is shown as with two fingers of her left hand she lifts the shadowed canopy of swaddling cloth away from the Infant Christ. A third heavenly glow is provided by the Infant Christ’s halo. The plank, upon which rest a basin and a sponge, also borrows from the iconography of the manger-altar analogy of Early Netherlandish painting.

While Goltzius’s widely-disseminated prints were influential in the propagation of Northern mannerism, his transition to painting at the age of forty-two is seen to mark a move towards a more classicising style, both for Goltzius and the Haarlem school of painting to which he belonged. However, Karel van Mander remarked on this innovation of his friend Goltzius during the latter’s Italian travels. The present lot bears similarities to the well- known Parmanese artist Antonio Allegri da Correggio’s La Notte (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, inv. no. 152) particularly in its lighting and with the choir of gesticulating angels in the upper left of the composition.