Carved in high relief and painted white. The altarpiece is composed of several pieces of wood that are joined with metal strips.

Three fingers are missing from the Virgin’s right hand, also from the right hand of one of the angels beside Mary’s left hand. There is some woodworm damage, the paintwork is damaged in places.

…; from the clandestine Franciscan church in Postelstraat, or one of the other two clandestine churches in Den Bosch;¹¹Most probably mentioned in the 1811 inventory of the said church in Postelstraat as Een gebeeldhouwde Lieve Vrouw-Hemelvaart, see H. Ebeling, ‘Bossche kerkinventarissen 1811’, Bossche bijdragen 9 (1928-29), pp. 302-07. transferred to the Sint-Janskathedraal, Den Bosch, 1812; by which donated to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1876; transferred to the museum, 1885; on loan to the Museum Krona (formerly known as the Museum voor Religieuze Kunst), Uden,²²Inv. no. MRK 0031. since 1970

Object number: BK-NM-153

This white-painted wooden altarpiece portrays the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. She is looking heavenwards, with arms outstretched, and is floating on a cloud supported by two angels. Two smaller angels hold a crown of roses above her head. Cherubs and more small angels hover against the arched background of clouds.

The altarpiece was donated in 1876 by the church fabric of the Sint-Janskathedraal in Den Bosch to the Rijksmuseum. However, the object originally came from one of the three clandestine Catholic churches still in use in that city in 1811. These churches were located in Postelstraat, Gastelstraat and Vugterstraat. When Napoleon returned the Sint-Janskathedraal to the Catholic community that year, he ordered the clandestine churches to be abolished. On 14 and 15 November the three churches’ inventories were drawn up,³³Published by H. Ebeling, ‘Bossche kerkinventarissen 1811’, Bossche bijdragen 9 (1928-29), pp. 302-07. and then divided up between the Sint-Janskathedraal and the Kruiskerk. The inventory of the clandestine church at Postelstraat included ‘A sculpted Assumption of the Virgin’, which can very probably be identified as the work featured here. It was a clandestine Franciscan church that had been housed since 1681 in an old brewery behind Huis van Boxtel (today 46-48 Postelstraat).⁴⁴For the history of this clandestine church see A. van Sasse van Ysselt, De voorname huizen en gebouwen van ’s-Hertogenbosch alsmede hun eigenaars of bewoners in vroegere eeuwen: Aantekeningen uit de Bossche schepenprotocollen, loopende van 1500-1810, Den Bosch 1910-14, vol. 1, pp. 234-45, esp. p. 237 and T. Vogel, Schuilkerken en hun bedienaren in ’s-Hertogenbosch 1629-1811, Den Bosch 2010, pp. 62-66. Together, the pieces mentioned in the inventory give an idea of the chapel in which they were used. They included a ‘painting depicting Our Lord’, a painting ‘Depicting the Birth’, a ‘Wooden Crucifix with Mary and Jesus’, a ‘silver Blessed Lady and ten silver Dishes’, as well as a confessional, a pulpit, a communion rail, an organ, eight paintings, eleven statues, 25 loose benches and 56 chairs.

A great many of the sculptures decorating the numerous clandestine churches in the province of North Brabant came from the Southern Netherlands, Antwerp in particular. There, religious works were made on a far larger scale than in the Protestant north, with the late baroque style dominating into the nineteenth century. Important features of that style also prevail in the present altarpiece, carved in high relief: lavishly draped, fluttering garments, emotive gestures, swirling clouds and a profusion of chubby cherubs. However, the quality of this relief exceeds the average production of religious sculpture in the Southern Netherlands. In various respects the Amsterdam Assumption of the Virgin is closely akin to work of the prominent Antwerp sculptor Michiel van der Voort I (1667-1737) and that of some of his pupils. The composition largely corresponds with Van der Voort’s Assumption of the Virgin of 1722-24 above the altar of Sint-Ermelindiskerk in Meldert.⁵⁵See KIK-IRPA object no. 6762 and P. Philippot, D. Coekelberghs, P. Loze and D. Vautier, L’Architecture religieuse et la sculpture baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et la principauté de Liège: 1600-1770, Sprimont 2003, p. 425. The pose of the angel on the left below Mary is practically the same, while that of the two Marys is also very similar. Their composition is based on an early version of an altarpiece – likewise arched – of the Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1621) by Rubens which until 1776 was located in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekapel of the Jesuit church in Antwerp and was imitated many times.⁶⁶Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. Gemäldegalerie, 518. She can also be recognized in a Madonna by Van der Voort’s pupil Walter Pompe (1703-1777) at a street corner in Turnhout,⁷⁷Onze Lieve Vrouwe ter Engelen, 1740. Figure from an Assumption group currently in a recess on the corner of Van Halstraat and Patersstraat in Turnhout. Van der Herck mentions that the accompanying angels have also survived, but it is not known where they were at the time, cf. C. van der Herck, ‘Walter Pompe en zijn werk’, Antwerpen’s Oudheidkundige Kring 11 (1935), pp. 145-86, no. 60; L. van Liebergen, Walter Pompe beeldhouwer 1703-1777, exh. cat. Uden (Museum voor Religieuze Kunst) 1979, no. 72, pl. 20. and in a pulpit by Hendrik Frans Verbruggen (1654-1724) – another of Van der Voort’s pupils – in the Keizerskapel in Antwerp – where the Virgin, personifying the Church, supports the barrel of the pulpit.⁸⁸Cf. M. Schapelhouman, ‘Beelden op papier; Notities bij een groep Zuidnederlandse beeldhouwerstekeningen uit de late barok’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 38 (1990), pp. 123-41, esp. pp. 126-27; P. Philippot, D. Coekelberghs, P. Loze and D. Vautier, L’Architecture religieuse et la sculpture baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et la principauté de Liège: 1600-1770, Sprimont 2003, pp. 552-53. The figure recurs in a variant of this pulpit in Sint Servatius at Kersbeek-Miskom, see KIK-IRPA object no. 19920. Verbruggen’s St Bavo figure on the high altar of Ghent cathedral has a rather similar pose and the clouds on which he is standing, represented as concentric circles with lobate edges, are likewise reminiscent of the Amsterdam altarpiece.⁹⁹P. Philippot, D. Coekelberghs, P. Loze and D. Vautier, L’Architecture religieuse et la sculpture baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et la principauté de Liège: 1600-1770, Sprimont 2003, pp. 984-85. Clouds of this type are found frequently on late-baroque altars from the Southern Netherlands, usually as separate formations of thick, layered clouds that appear to float more or less freely in space. However, in this representation they form an unbroken cloudy sky, in low relief, on account of the limited depth of the wooden components.

In the Amsterdam Assumption, the young angels and cherubs have remarkably plump bodies and cheeks that continue into similarly plump double chins which practically assimilate the bottom of the chin. Both these cherubs as well as the flying and kneeling poses they assume closely resemble their counterparts in the decoration of the oak confessional chair in the Sint-Pieterkerk in Wezembeek-Oppem (near Brussels), carved around 1700-10 by an anonymous sculptor.¹⁰¹⁰See KIK-IRPA object no. 7765. Their facial type also recurs in the heads of the Christ Child and of two cherubs on the socle of a Virgin and Child in Antwerp cathedral, a polychrome statue by an unknown sculptor dating from around 1700.¹¹¹¹See KIK-IRPA object no. 87516. This sculpture and the present altarpiece also have the fine, sickle-shaped pleating in common. Nevertheless, the faces of the Virgin are entirely different from one another, proving that the two works could not have had the same maker, but, at most, derive from the same period and the same artistic background. The classical figure of the present Virgin and, in particular, her finely rendered, yearning expression are also reminiscent of the work of the Antwerp-Brussels sculptor Matthieu van Beveren (1630-1690) (cf. BK-1962-5). Another striking detail of the Amsterdam altarpiece is the greatly foreshortened pose of the angel on the right below the Virgin. Such Atlantean figures are found in naturalist pulpits as bearers of the barrel and/or sounding board. An early example is the pulpit of Artus Quellinus II (1625-1700) in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwenkerk in Vilvoorde dating from 1665 – formerly in Sint-Joriskerk in Antwerp – where one of the four supporting angels has a similar stance.¹²¹²P. Philippot, D. Coekelberghs, P. Loze and D. Vautier, L’Architecture religieuse et la sculpture baroques dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et la principauté de Liège: 1600-1770, Sprimont 2003, p. 359, ill. 2. All in all it seems most likely that this superior altarpiece was made in Antwerp in the final years of the seventeenth century or in the early eighteenth. However, it has not yet been possible to associate it convincingly with the name of a maker.

Titia de Haseth Möller and Bieke van der Mark, 2026

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 423, with earlier literature; L.C.B.M. van Liebergen, Franciscus in Brabant, exh. cat. Uden (Museum voor Religieuze Kunst) 1977, no. 35; C. Peeters, De Sint Janskathedraal te ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Hague 1985, p. 341; L.C.B.M. van Liebergen (ed.), Modeste Barok: Beeldwerk in Brabant in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw, exh. cat. Uden (Museum voor Religieuze Kunst) 1994, no. 59, fig. 91; T. Vogel, Schuilkerken en hun bedienaren in ’s-Hertogenbosch 1629-1811, Den Bosch 2010, p. 66

T. de Haseth Möller and B. van der Mark, 2026, 'anonymous, The Assumption of the Virgin, Antwerp, c. 1700', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200116115