(Nuremberg 1575/80–1654)
The Virgin with the Swaddled Child in a landscape,
oil on panel, 37 x 26.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Rainer Stüwe for confirming the attribution of the present painting to Georg Gärtner the Younger. His extensive report, dated May 2023, accompanies the present lot.

Georg Gärtner the Younger was a German painter and engraver active in Nuremberg in the first half of the seventeenth century. When Hans Hoffmann died in 1591/92, Georg Gärtner the Younger became one of the foremost exponents of the so-called Dürer Renaissance, a phenomenon of increased interest in Albrecht Dürer’s works that spread throughout Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with a particularly strong foothold in Dürer’s hometown of Nuremberg and at the Imperial court of Prague. Gärtner trained in his father’s workshop, which he took over in 1612. Under his stewardship, the workshop gradually expanded and became one of the leading ones in Nuremberg. Gärtner was dean of the local painters’ guild from 1620–24, and again from 1638–42. Praised to be a ‘felicissimus Düreri imitator’, he and his workshop produced variations after Dürer’s works, emulating his style but developing a highly individual artistic language.

The Virgin Mary in the present painting rests with the Infant in her arms on a stone bench with a red velvet cushion. The corners are decorated with golden tassels. Over a wide crimson dress, Mary wears an olive-green robe that falls over her knees in many folds to the floor. Above the breast, the gold braid is held together by a brooch set with ruby and pearls. The Child, swaddled up to the back of the head in white linen sheets, sleeps peacefully in her arms. A wide river landscape with green to pale blue hills opens up to the left behind the figures. A bright strip of sky above the horizon indicates the beginning of dawn and shifts the scene to the early hours of the morning. The two haloes of the figures stand out against the morning sky in very soft transitions from pale yellow to red-orange.

The painter of the present panel based his work on an engraving by Albrecht Dürer dated 1520, which was created shortly before his trip to the Netherlands and which is mentioned in his travel diary as one of the “three new Marys” (Bartsch 38/Meder 40a/c). As the painter sought to enhance Dürer’s engraving by achieving a smoother and more brilliant painterly effect and by lending more spatial depth to the composition, some minor alterations can be observed. Rainer Stüwe remarks: “Dürer’s haloes appear radiant to glary, but in the painting, they have a soft shimmer; the change of the Child’s cross-nimbus to a round one reduces the striking effect of the exemplary engraving to a softer one. The proportions of the picture panel are also slightly wider than the engraving, giving more space for the scenery behind the figures. The background is freshened by two young trees and a partially visible bush. All in all, the landscape is rendered more clearly than on the engraving. The two trees in particular with the high viewpoint of the landscape taken from Dürer’s copperplate remind of Dutch models of Joachim Patinier. In summary, it can be stated that the painting reshaped the prototype in a consistent way towards a softer, winsome impression and improved it entirely in the spirit of the so-called Dürer Renaissance”. Stüwe continues: “The stylistic differentiation from Dürer’s engraving points strongly to the well-known Dürer copyist Georg Gärtner of Nuremberg. In particular, the emphasis on soft flesh tones and softly shimmering light effects is very characteristic for Gärtner”. A work of high quality, Stüwe suggests that the Madonna and Child has been executed around 1620/30.