JAN GOSSAERT, CALLED MABUSE The Virgin and Child Seated at the Foot of a Tree.
Engraving, 1522. 120x86 mm; 4 3/4x3 1/2 inches, thread margins. Ex-collection unknown collector, brownish black ink stamp with the letter S in a circle (not in Lugt). A superb, well-inked impression of this extremely scarce, early engraving.
Gossaert (circa 1478-1532), called Mabuse from his Low Country birthplace, Maubeuge, now a part of France on the French/Belgian border, worked primarily in Antwerp, where he was a member of the artists Guild of St. Luke from 1503 onward. He was one of the first Northern Renaissance painters to visit Italy and Rome, which he did in 1508–09, and a leader of the style known as Romanism, which brought elements of Italian Renaissance painting to the north. He was a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer and the young Lucas van Leyden; according to the Dutch art chronicler Carl van Mander, writing in the late 1500s, Gossaert and van Leyden traveled together in 1527 to Ghent and Mechelen. Gossaert was influenced by the celebrated Netherlandish artists who came before him, notably Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Hollstein 2.
