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

This rare, accomplished portrait can be added to the small body of work by the little-known painter now called the Master or Monogrammist B, who was active in the second half of the sixteenth century, who 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.

A note on the provenance:
Samuel S. Joseph was a renowned collector of Old Masters, most notably within the Dutch and Flemish Schools. The jewel of his collection was Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl, now in the Frick Collection, New York. Paintings from the collection were widely exhibited, often hanging in the Royal Academy’s annual loan exhibitions at Burlington House. About two years before his death, Joseph became completely blind; his interest in art however was not deterred. He and his wife continued to collect, especially within the more tactile categories of netsuke, inro and okimono, where Joseph could be guided by his sense of touch.

Joseph acquired the present portrait in the deceased collection sale of merchant Hollingworth Magniac, of Colworth House, Bedfordshire. He made his considerable fortune trading in Canton; his firm Magniac & Co. would later become Jardine, Matheson & Co., which would grow into Asia’s largest trading house in the 19^th Century. Further highlights from the Colworth Collection included Raphael’s Portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino (private collection).