Portrait of a lady, bust-length

An artist of seminal importance in the development of Early Netherlandish painting, Hans Memling was born in the German city of Seligenstadt on the river Main, near Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg. He is first recorded in 1465, when he registered as a citizen of Bruges under the name Jan van Mimnelinghe. Though nothing is known with certainty of his early training, Rogier van der Weyden’s influence permeates much of Memling’s art. This, combined with the fact that the young artist arrived in Bruges shortly after van der Weyden’s death in 1464, seems to corroborate Giorgio Vasari’s assertion in his Lives of the Artists that Memling began his career as an assistant in Rogier’s Brussels workshop. In Bruges, which at the time was one of the wealthiest and most economically important cities in Europe, and the commercial centre of the Burgundian Netherlands, Memling quickly became one of the most successful painters of altarpieces, devotional works, and portraits of his time, winning commissions from the city’s wealthy burghers and clergymen, as well as foreign bankers and businessmen.

Memling’s Portrait of a Lady was first published in the late 1920s by Max J. Friedländer (1928, op. cit.) and Friedrich Winkler, the latter of whom described it as `a delightfully pure and luminous picture’ (ibid.). It is one of just nineteen independent portraits by Memling to have survived, and moreover is one of only two that depict women, the second being the Portrait of a lady (Sibylla Sambetha) in the Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges, which dates to 1480 and might have been made as part of an epitaph (fig. 1; Bruges, Memlingmuseum). Additional portraits of women, of course, may be found throughout his oeuvre, but these are either donor figures in larger altarpieces, or pendants to portraits of their husbands, conceived as an diptych or triptych wing.

Scholars have endorsed the attribution to Memling since it was first proposed in the early twentieth century, though Maryan Ainsworth elected to take a more conservative approach in her 1998 From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalogue (op. cit.), where she published it as `Attributed to Hans Memling’, which she felt was a more appropriate reflection of the painting’s condition. The Metropolitan Museum of Art deaccessioned it as such at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2013. Following the auction, the painting was cleaned, removing old repaint and greatly improving its appearance. Soon thereafter, it was selected as a key highlight of the exhibition Memling: Rinascimento fiammingo at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, where it was once again catalogued with an unqualified attribution to Hans Memling (op. cit.) and served as one of the prime images for the exhibition’s marketing campaign, appearing on billboards and banners throughout the city.

There is some scholarly debate around the dating of the painting, though it is universally understood to have been created sometime in the second half of the 1470s. Dirk de Vos (op. cit.) places the picture to between Memling's Portrait of Maria Baroncelli of 1475 (fig. 2; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and his Sint-Janshopitaal Portrait of a lady of 1480. Barbara Lane (op. cit.) favours a dating of circa 1480, based on comparison with two works by the Bruges-based Master of the Legend of St. Ursula, an artist closely related to Hans Memling, namely the Portrait of a Lady with a Pink (Antwerp, Museum Mayer van den Bergh) and the Epitaph of Anna van Nieuwenhove (fig. 3; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). She further notes that the girl’s facial features and expression recalls those seen in many of the faces of the young ladies who are shown kneeling on the right wing of the Moreel Triptych (Bruges, Groeningemuseum), which was painted after 1484. Indeed, several of the women wear similar headgear to the cone-shaped hennin a velvet frontel seen in the present portrait. In 1985, Ingrid Verhoeven (op. cit.) also observed that the sitter resembles one of the women who appears in the lower right corner of the central panel of Memling's Last Judgement triptych (Gdańsk, Muzeum Narodowe; fig. 4), but does not go so far as to say the women are identical. In fact, it is difficult to imagine any of Memling patrons choosing to be represented as a damned soul, and as such, any physical similarities must be the result of Memling’s approach to the representation of women in general. Accordingly, the identity of the attractive young sitter whom Memling portrays here remains a mystery, though given the quality of her attire, she must have had considerable status and wealth.

At some point in its history the panel was probably cut down, removing a portion of its lower edge. Presumably, the sitter would originally have appeared with at least one hand showing. Indeed, Memling invariably depicted his women in this fashion. Based on its similarity to Memling’s aforementioned Bruges Portrait of a lady, Till-Holger Borchert most recently once again advanced a dating for the present portrait to around 1480, concluding that even though the painting has suffered somewhat over the five hundred years of its existence, ‘the original impalpable finishing touches of transparent glazes that are still visible around the nose, the mouth, the forehead, and the eyes reflect the entirety of Memling’s masterful artistry’ (‘le impalpabili rifiniture originali di vernice trasparente ancora visibili intorno al naso, alla bocca, alla fronte e agli occhi rivelano tutta la maestria di Memling’; 2014, op. cit.).