The Brussels Master of 1520 (active Brussels, first half of the 16th Century)

These panels probably originally formed part of the wing of an altarpiece, where they would have been organized vertically. The fact that the full profiles of the columns’ bases are portrayed in the Saint Catherine panel suggests that it would have occupied the lower position while the Saint Paul panel, with its truncated bases, would have rested on top. Representations of Saints Barbara and Peter of similar format likely served as counterparts to the paintings, following a well-established convention in Northern Renaissance altarpieces. We are grateful to Lars Hendrikman, who working from photographs has identified these panels as by the anonymous hand responsible for a coherent group of paintings formerly given to Bernard van Orley, assembled around the dated 1520 Altarpiece of the Death of the Virgin (Musée de l’Assistance Publique, Brussels, see M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Paintings, VIII, Jan Gossart and Bernart van Orley, trans. H. Norden, New York, 1972, no. 84). To this “Brussels Master of 1520” should also be given a small triptych of standing saints in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel, two standing Virgins in the Prado and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and a triptych in the Rijksmuseum, Enschede (see ibid., nos. 83 and 125a).

In each of the panels, the saint is shown in a landscape setting framed by trompe-l’oeil marble columns and an arch with classicizing portrait roundels in the spandrels. Wearing a bejeweled headdress and a sumptuous gown of gold and crimson, Saint Catherine casts her somber gaze on the ground, where rests a fragment of the wheel used in her martyrdom. Her persecutor, the emperor Maxentius, lies trampled beneath her hovering figure. In contrast to the quiet, contemplative mood of this scene, lively action animates the panel with Saint Paul, who is shown at the moment of his conversion while he was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians. Blinded by a light from heaven, a dramatically foreshortened Paul tumbles from his fallen steed and thrusts his arm toward the sky where God appears to ask of him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

In the 19th century, these panels belonged to Sir Francis Cook (1817-1901). One of the most distinguished connoisseurs of his day, Cook began collecting paintings in 1868 with the guidance of Sir John Charles Robinson (1824-1913), a luminary and leader in the Victorian art world and the first superintendent of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum, London). The extraordinary group of Old Master pictures he amassed was housed at Doughty House in Richmond, and included masterpieces such as Jan and Hubert van Eyck's Three Marys at the Tomb (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, inv. 2339), Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi's Adoration of the Magi (Washington, National Gallery, inv. 1952.2.2), and Titian's La Schiavona (London, National Gallery, inv. NG5385), to name just a few. The present paintings appear in the Doughty House catalogues of 1913-1915 as Bernard van Orley.

We are grateful to Lars Hendrikman for his assistance in cataloguing this painting.