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. However, in a 1977 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. Subsequently, in 1979, Frits van Kretschmar went on to identify an interesting portrait of a man and wife with their children (first published by de Vries), dated 1573, 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. 1146-1147, 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.