Carved and originally polychromed. Extending from the left side is a rectangular wooden tenon that functioned as a securing element for the missing fragment with the Virgin and the Christ Child. The reverse side is largely flat with a vertical angle. Dendrochronological analysis resulted in the dating of the outermost annual ring in the year 1460. Given that sapwood is absent, the felling of the tree has been estimated to have occurred after 1468. The timber likely originates from the Twente/Westphalia area in the northeast of the Netherlands/northwest of Germany.

The left-hand fragment with Mary and Child, Luke’s lower left arm and hand holding the pallet, the brush in his right hand, his head-covering, a section of the floor and the bench are missing. There are also various points of breakage. The polychromy has been removed.

…; from the estate of ‘Count’ Jan Jacob Nahuys (1801-1864), Utrecht, with eight other objects (BK-NM-20, -23 to -28 and -31), fl. 400 for all, to the Dutch State, in or after 1864; transferred to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1875; transferred to the museum, 1885

Object number: BK-NM-29

St Luke the Evangelist painting a portrait of Mary was a much-beloved theme for painted altarpieces, especially in the Low Countries of the Middle Ages. These groups were often commissioned by guilds bearing the saint’s name, representing not only painters but also occasionally woodcarvers and other artisans. For obvious reasons, sculptors turned to this iconography less frequently. One rare example is a group by the South German woodcarver Jakob Beinhart (c. 1460-c. 1525), today preserved in the National Museum in Warsaw, believed to have formed part of the retable of the painters’ guild of Wroclaw (today Warsaw) that dates from circa 1506.¹¹Warswaw, National Museum, inv. no. Sr. 15, see T.-H. Borchert, Van Eyck tot Dürer: De Vlaamse primitieven en Centraal-Europa 1420-1530, exh. cat. Bruges (Groeningemuseum) 2010-11, no. 269. The present, far more simple Amsterdam carving, which originally also included the figures of the Virgin and the Christ Child that would have appeared to the left of this fragment, could also have belonged to a retable. The thick-set, compact proportions of Luke’s body suggest an origin in the Northern Netherlands, where painters established guilds dedicated to St Luke in the cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Delft and Leiden. Notwithstanding the highly characteristic features of the painting evangelist’s face – the wavy forehead wrinkles, broad jawline and somewhat pouty lips – a more precise regional attribution remains problematic in the absence of works suitable for comparison. The motif of the ring encircling the out-turned chaperon that hangs from the liripipe below Luke’s left shoulder also appears in a version produced by the German painter Derick Baegert (c. 1440-after 1509) in the Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte in Münster, an image influenced by early Netherlandish models that dates from circa 1480.²²Münster, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, inv. no. 62 WKV, see T.-H. Borchert, Van Eyck tot Dürer: De Vlaamse primitieven en Centraal-Europa 1420-1530, exh. cat. Bruges (Groeningemuseum) 2010-11, no. 90.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 89, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2024, 'anonymous, St Luke Painting the Virgin, Northern Netherlands, c. 1515', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035577