Sculpted and originally polychromed. There are fine traces of (tooth) chisels over the entire surface (apart from the faces), especially on the sides of the mantle. The reverse is slightly worked and contains, in a hollowed-out groove, a wrought-iron ring for attachment.

The attribute in the hands of the Christ Child is missing. The Virgin’s hands, which hold the Christ Child, broke off and were reattached. Her left arm, both hands, and part of the Christ Child’s left foot have been renewed. The polychromy is largely missing. The Virgin’s face still displays remnants of dirty polychromy and the hem of her garment contains remnants of gilding.

…; from the dealer M. de Maan, The Hague, fl. 120, to the museum, 1901

Object number: BK-NM-11618

Even though the stylistic and technical aspects of this Virgin and Child clearly indicate its origin in Westphalia around 1410-20, scholars were long in the dark as to its correct art-historical placement. Pit, who acquired the statue for the museum in 1901 from a dealer in The Hague, supposed that it had originated in Limburg in the fourteenth century.¹¹A. Pit, Catalogus van de beeldhouwwerken in het Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst te Amsterdam, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1904, no. 12; A. Pit, Catalogus van de beeldhouwwerken in het Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst te Amsterdam, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1915, no. 28. According to Leeuwenberg, the style sooner corresponded to that of Northern Netherlandish sculpture of the third quarter of the fifteenth century. ‘The complete lack of facial expression and the form of the garments’, however, caused him to have ‘some doubts’ about the authenticity of the statue.²²J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, p. 73. In spite of its mediocre quality – the sculptor clearly had trouble breaking free from the block shape – there now proves to have been no reason for such doubts.

A fine structure was applied to almost the entire surface by means of (tooth) chisels. Only the faces of the Virgin and Child have a smooth finish. This technical characteristic and the type of stone fit in seamlessly with late-medieval Westphalian sculpture, which made almost exclusive use of the local Baumberg sandstone, a finely workable, sandy limestone quarried near the city of Münster. The style, too, is deeply rooted in the sculptural tradition of Westphalia. Mary’s broad, slightly coarse face – characterized by a high forehead, eyelids that cover much of the eyeballs, and a pronounced chin – recur in many other Marian statues from Westphalia, of which the Madonna (datable to around 1395-1400) in the Sankt-Paulikirche in Soest (North Rhine-Westphalia) is among the most famous examples.³³M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, fig. 3. For other examples displaying this facial type, see ibid., figs. 12-14 and nos. 2, 7, 11, 12. Her relatively slender figure and the striking way in which her right hand holds her seemingly weightless son by his left leg or foot occur in a number of works that originated between around 1390 and 1420.⁴⁴M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, nos. 1, 7. Cf. also the Darsow-Madonna, which was destroyed in the Second World War, in the Marienkirche in Lübeck (for an old photograph, see ibid., fig. 51), which, since Paatz, has usually been attributed to a sculptor of Westphalia (Münster); see W. Paatz, ‘Münster, Bremen und Lübeck’, in G. Fiensch et al., Festschrift Martin Wackernagel, Cologne/Graz 1958, pp. 75-81, esp. p. 77. Although of higher artistic quality than the Amsterdam statue, the Virgin and Child from the Pfarrkirche Sankt Johannes der Täufer in Kommende Lage (Lower Saxony) probably offers the best basis for comparison.⁵⁵M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, no. 7. The Virgin of this statue of around 1420 (the layer of polychromy is modern) resembles the Amsterdam Mary, not only in the previously mentioned points but also in the flat crown decorated with floral motifs and the Virgin’s hair, with its parting in the middle and tresses that disappear beneath her mantle on the left shoulder and hang loosely plaited to the front over her right shoulder. In both works, moreover, the pointed tip of Mary’s right shoe protrudes from her garment, which falls in graceful, broken folds onto the thin plinth. The drapery scheme of the mantle differs between these two statues, but apt parallels to the Amsterdam Virgin and Child can be found in a cycle of statues representing the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the St.-Annenmuseum, Lübeck, which are generally attributed to a sculptor trained in Westphalia.⁶⁶M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, figs. 7b-c; A. Legner (ed.), Die Parler und der schöne Stil 1350-1400. Europäische Kunst unter den Luxemburgern, vol. 2, exh. cat. Cologne (Schnütgen-Museum/Kunsthalle) 1978, p. 532. Albrecht, by contrast, localized the origins of these statues to Flanders; see A.E. Albrecht, Steinskulptuur in Lübeck um 1400: Stiftung und Herkunft, Berlin 1997, pp. 60ff, esp. p. 84 and figs. 4-12. They hark back to an older compositional scheme of beautiful Madonnas (Schöne Madonnen), whereby the mantle is draped like a short apron with two large, bowl-shaped folds in front of the body, clasped under the arm on one side and hanging over the arm on the other side. The tails of the mantle fall to either side of the body in a cascade of complex pipe folds.

Münster and the Hanseatic city of Lübeck were centres of trade not only in unworked blocks of Baumberg sandstone but also in Westphalian sculpture, which explains their rather wide dissemination in northwestern Europe, including the Low Countries.⁷⁷R. Karrenbrock, ‘Kleinodien aus Westfalen, Versandt über das Meer: Bildwerke aus Baumberger Sandstein und ihre Bedeutung für den Hanseraum’, in M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, pp. 55-78, esp. p. 63. For example, a Westphalian statue that was excavated on the cathedral square in Utrecht in 1936 is possibly a Christ as Salvator Mundi (whose head is missing).⁸⁸Utrecht, Centraal Museum, inv. no. 7798a, see J. Klinckaert, De verzamelingen van het Centraal Museum Utrecht, vol. 3, Beeldhouwkunst, coll. cat. Utrecht 1997, no. 51 and M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, fig. 50. In the period when this statue was produced, around 1370-80, the administrative ties between Utrecht and Münster were particularly close. Between 1378 and 1393, a former bishop of Münster, Floris van Wevelinghofe, occupied the bishop’s throne in Utrecht. It is no coincidence that the Utrecht statue is closely related in style to the statues in the portal of the church of the noble abbey of Überwasser in Münster, where his sister was abbess.⁹⁹J. Klinckaert, De verzamelingen van het Centraal Museum Utrecht, vol. 3, Beeldhouwkunst, coll. cat. Utrecht 1997, p. 53. Two other works that must have found their way at some point from Westphalia to the Low Countries are now preserved in the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht. The works in question are two Marian statues, one of which represents a slightly earlier phase (late fourteenth century) and the other a slightly later phase (c. 1430) in Westphalian stone sculpture than the present example.¹⁰¹⁰Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent, inv. nos. ABM bs617 and ABM bs605, respectively; see J. Klinckaert, De verzamelingen van het Centraal Museum Utrecht, vol. 3, Beeldhouwkunst, coll. cat. Utrecht 1997, pp. 77, 102-03 and M. Anczykowski et al., Westfälische Steinskulptur des späten Mittelalters 1380-1540, exh. cat. Unna (Evangelische Stadtkirche) 1992, no. 1 and fig. 13. These works also display fine chisel marks over the entire surface, apart from the faces. The older piece, in which Mary similarly holds her naked son’s right foot, can therefore be considered a stylistic forerunner of the present statue. In the later statue, the Christ Child sits up straight and is dressed, and his mother’s drapery is characterized by folds that fall more naturally, with slight creases on the stomach.

Bieke van der Mark, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 73, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2024, 'anonymous, Virgin and Child, Westphalia, c. 1410 - c. 1420', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035564