A standard-bearer in full armor near a coat of arms in a niche

This drawing, once attributed to the late fifteenth-century South Netherlandish engraver known as Master WA (or Master W with the Key; see Provenance), must rather be associated with drawings made at the end of the fifteenth century in Southern Germany. Comparable in technique and subject, and to a certain degree in style, is a sheet possibly signed by the Bavarian artist Mair von Landshut (active circa 1485-1520) at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. 18846; see M. Gammel, Studien zu Mair von Landshut, Ph.D., Berlin, Technische Universität, 2011, I, no. 8.10, II, fig. 42). Wrongly associated in the past with Mair and now given to Swabian draughtsmen from around 1485-1500 is a group of four other drawings of armor, also done in pen and heightened with white but with subtle washes, with which the present drawing can also be compared: in the collection at the Veste Coburg (inv. Z 231), the British Museum, London (inv. 1889,0724.71), the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 1446), and the National Gallery of Art, Washington (inv. 1998.17.9; see C. Andersson in The Touch of the Artist. Master Drawings from the Woodner Collections, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1995-1996, no. 15, ill.). Of an earlier date is a study of a knight in armor in metalpoint, recorded in a Swiss private collection (F. Winzinger, ‘An Unknown German Drawing of the Gothic Period’, Master Drawings, XVIII, no. 1, Spring 1980, pp. 27-29, pl. 11).