A Triptych: central panel: The Adoration of the Magi; left wing: The Nativity; right wing: The Flight into Egypt

The composition was one of the most popular of the Antwerp Mannerists, regarded by Dan Ewing as being based on a lost prototype by de Beer (see D. Ewing, The Paintings and Drawings of Jan de Beer, diss., Ann Arbor, 1978, I, pp. 172-7). Friedländer regarded the present type as being by the hand of the Master of the von Groote Adoration, an anonymous artist whom he named for an altarpiece formerly in the von Groote collection, Kitzburg (see M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting, XI, Leiden, 1974, p. 70, no. 27, pls. 36-7), although subsequent scholars have questioned whether they all derive from the same workshop. Certainly, however, the present work seems particularly close to the triptych in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (John G. Johnson Collection), given by Friedländer to the von Groote Master, and catalogued by Ewing within his Group II: the Munich type, after the triptych in the Alte Pinakothek.

We are very grateful to Dr. Peter van den Brink of the Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.