Carved and polychromed. The reverse is virtually flat.

The socle has sustained damage due to woodworm infestation. St Anne’s left hand is missing. A lock of hair on the Christ Child is entirely abraded. The (later) polychromy layer has partly chipped off.

…; sale, The Hague (Venduehuis), 1882, fl. 3, to the Nederlands Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague; transferred to the museum, 1885; on loan to the Museum Arnhem, Arnhem, 1953-72

Object number: BK-NM-5688

St Anne was highly venerated in the late Middle Ages, as also reflected in the artistic production of this period.¹¹For the veneration of St Anne in the Low Countries, see T. Brandenburg et al., Heilige Anna, grote moeder: De cultus van de Heilige Moeder Anna en haar familie in de Nederlanden en aangrenzende streken, exh. cat. Uden (Museum voor Religieuze Kunst) 1992. Exceptionally popular were carved images of Anna Selbdritt, as its name implies a composition comprising three figures: the Christ Child, his grandmother St Anne, and his mother, the Virgin Mary. This iconographic type formed as it were a succinct manifestation of Christ’s lineage on his mother’s side, as well as an implicit visualisation of the theology of the Immaculate Conception. In the earliest of these groups, Mary was typically portrayed as a miniature-sized woman held in the arms or sitting at the feet of her mother, St Anne. From about 1470, however, this unnatural disproportion between mother and daughter was generally abandoned in favour of an iconography increasingly situated in the sphere of everyday life, as masterfully displayed in the Master of Joachim and Anne’s (active c. 1460-c. 1480) interpretation of this theme (BK-NM-8974).

Although dated circa 1510 on the basis of criteria such as the arrangement of the drapery folds, the group discussed here remains true to the traditional model. This model remained quite common in Brabant long after 1500, particularly in the form of the fairly conservative devotional statuettes produced in Mechelen (cf. (BK-NM-1280). Even the polygonal form of the profiled base quite clearly matches the socles on these poupées de Malines (cf. BK-NM-2491). While an element of Brabantine influence can certainly be discerned in the Amsterdam group, the style of this much heavier work is more akin to Westphalian woodcarving. St Anne’s broad physiognomic type and her vacant facial expression are more closely aligned with those of the St Anne and Mary in another Westphalian St Anne Trinity in the Rijksmuseum’s collection (BK-NM-2535).

Bieke van der Mark, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 126

B. van der Mark, 2024, 'anonymous, The Virgin and Child with St Anne, Westphalia, c. 1510', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035599