Ferdinand Hebenstreit (Munich, fl. 1590-1616)

This may be the only known drawing by Ferdinand Hebenstreit, member of a family of Munich glass painters, whose authorship is attested by the monogram and the provenance, recorded on the sheet’s verso. The autograph inscription also indicates his model was a work by Christoph Schwarz, the Bavarian painter, although it has not been possible to identify the exact source. The drawing may have been made as a contribution to an album amicorum, a genre that was particularly popular in German-speaking lands (see F. Spira in Dürer and Beyond. Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012, pp. 154-162).