Portrait of a lady, bust-length, in a black dress with a white ruff and cap

We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Rudi Ekkart and Claire van den Donk for proposing the attribution to the Master B (on the basis of a photograph) and their assistance in the preparation of this catalogue entry. They add the present portrait to the master’s small body of work, each signed with the initial B, who was active in the second half of the sixteenth century and was historically believed to have worked in Utrecht. During the 1920s, the artist was identified as Anthonis Blocklandt, yet with his death in 1583, and at least one work by Master B produced at a later date, Wolfgang Stechow rejected the attribution, instead proposing Joos de Beer, who worked in Utrecht between 1550 and his death in or around 1591. Ary Bob de Vries wrote at length about Master B in his dissertation on the Northern Netherlandish portraiture of the second half of the sixteenth century, adding several portraits to the oeuvre, among them two excellent works dated 1563 of a man and his wife with their children, believing them to represent Derk van Os and his wife. Scholars thus continued to theorise on Master B’s identity, with Roger d’Hulst in 1952 rejecting all aforementioned attributions, while adding to the body of work an interesting portrait of a member of the De la Faille family, dated 1573. Thirteen years later, Paul Philippot suggested that the master worked in Antwerp, and in 1977, in an article on the drawings of the Antwerp painter Bernaert de Rijckere, Karel Boon identified the present artist and De Rijckere as one and the same. It was in 1979 that Frits van Kretschmar then went on to identify the 1563 portrait of a man and wife with their children (first published by de Vries) as Adriaan van Santvoort and Anna van Hertsbeeke with their children, securely linking the master to the city of Antwerp, and further accepting Boon’s suggestion of his identity as Bernard de Rijckere.

Ekkart and Van den Donk note the similarity of the present work to other portraits by the Master B, particularly that of the portrait of a lady in the collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (see L. Helmus, De verzamelingen van het Centraal Museum Utrecht: Schilderkunst tot 1850, V, Utrecht, 1999, pp. 1146-7, no. 428), also monogrammed with a ‘B’ and dated 1573 in characteristic handwriting matching the present, with the portrait’s rendering also nearly identical to this, bar the woman’s white ruff.