South German (probably Ulm)
NG 722 
Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family

Susan Foister, 2024

Extracted from:
Susan Foister; with Rachel Billinge, Marika Spring and Lea Viehweger; and contributions by Lorne Campbell and Allison Goudie, The German Paintings before 1800 (London: National Gallery Global and Yale University Press, 2024).

Oil on wood, approximately 53.4 × 40.1 cm (excluding edging strips), painted surface approximately 52.8 × 40.1 cm

Inscription

GEBORNE HOFERIN

Provenance

The painting was acquired by Prince Ludwig Kraft Ernst von Oettingen‐Wallerstein (1791–1870) from Count Joseph von Rechberg (1769–1833) in 1816, and is first recorded in the Oettingen‐Wallerstein collection at Schloss Wallerstein in 1817–18 as a work by Israel von Mecheln (Israel van Meckenem) and again in 1826 and 1827.¹ It was exhibited for sale in 1848 at Kensington Palace, again as Israel von Mecheln (lot 65).² It was acquired along with the rest of the collection by Prince Albert, the Prince Consort (1819–1861), and was at Kensington Palace in 1854, where it was attributed to the Master of the Lyversberg Passion by Waagen.³ It was presented to the National Gallery along with other pictures by Queen Victoria at the Prince Consort’s wish in 1863.

Exhibitions

Kensington Palace, 1848 (65); Manchester 1857 (410).

Technical Notes

The painting was cleaned and restored in 1971, when a balsa backing and oak edging strips were attached to the panel (overall size including edging strips, 55.4 × 42.3 cm). The paint surface is in good condition with losses mainly limited to the join, old splits and some circular damages in the headdress and shoulder. The effect of a fine overall craquelure was reduced with retouching in the area of the face. Elsewhere, especially in the blue background, the thicker paint has wrinkled and broken up, with wide drying cracks.

The wood support was stated by Levey to be silver fir (Abies alba), but the identification may not be reliable.⁴ The panel is made from two boards with vertical grain; the join is 3.5 cm from the right edge, measured on the front. Two circular plugs of wood, one in her right shoulder and one in the headdress above her left eye are original and probably were inserted to replace knots. The original panel has been cut top and sides, but retains a narrow unpainted edge, approximately 7 mm wide, at the bottom.

The white ground consists of dolomite (calcium magnesium carbonate), with a minor component of calcium carbonate. There is evidence of an off‐white or pale pinkish priming composed of lead white with a little red lead. At the lower edge the ground and paint end with a raised barb indicating that the panel was prepared for painting in an engaged frame. Running over original paint are fragments of green paint, presumably from the frame (fig. 1). Although this paint seems to lie over a thin unpigmented layer that may be varnish, the green pigment in it is a naturally occurring mixture of copper‐containing minerals, suggesting that it is early if not original.

Examination with infrared reflectography produced inconclusive results: nothing that can certainly be identified as underdrawing could be seen.

The paint medium was identified as linseed oil by GC–MS analysis of samples from the white headdress, the blue background and the black dress; the oil in the white paint had been heat‐bodied.⁵

The dark blue background is painted with azurite, mixed with varying amounts of white to create the pattern. Other information about paint mixtures is from observations of the surface with a stereomicroscope. A mixture of orange and yellow earth pigments with verdigris seems to have been used for the paint of the inscription top left: examination confirmed it is original and integral to the portrait (fig. 2). The paint is thinly applied in general. Thicker paint has been used for the gathered edge of the headdress, with the [page 893] [page 894] depressions between the folds created by pushing aside thick paint to create real depressions in the paint layer, sometimes with an added touch of brown paint in the hollow of the fold (fig. 4). An opaque red‐brown line (containing red and black pigments) extends from the ear and runs around the forehead to create a sense of the thickness of the cloth of the headdress (fig. 5). Similar red‐brown paint is used to delineate the features in the eyes and nose, as well as the eyelashes. The eyes are brown with orange flecks in the iris, with blue pigment added to the whites. There are two catchlights in the left eye (fig. 6). The fly on the headdress has red eyes (fig. 8). The collar of the plum‐coloured damask underdress is painted with mixtures of red lake, azurite and white. The pattern of the black damask weave robe is painted with dark blue, probably containing azurite, just visible in the X‐radiograph and infrared reflectogram (figs 3, 7).

Subject

The sitter is placed against a dark blue damask‐weave cloth. She wears a robe of black damask weave, probably of silk velvet (fig. 9), which is lined or edged with white fur visible at the [page 895] [page 896] [page 897] neck and right wrist, probably squirrel (the black flecks seem too small to indicate ermine) (fig. 10); it is fastened in front with two gold‐coloured metal clasps (fig. 11). Underneath she wears a high‐necked dress of a plum‐coloured damask weave, probably of silk; it has a gold braid edging and is fastened by a red lace threaded through gold rings attached to the front edges. Her white headdress is formed from white cloth stretched over a roll of thick padding which creates a rounded form: the cloth is attached to the padding by a row of pins. The shadowing of the area of cloth shaped around her forehead suggests that it consists of tiers of numerous layers of veiling made from fine linen woven with fluted edges which are ‘set to overlap like roof tiles’ (figs 4, 5).⁶ The end of the headdress to the right is folded over and the overlapped layers secured with pins. The longer end of the headdress is folded around the neck and passed over the sitter’s left shoulder ‘like the shoulder‐cape and tippet of a man’s hood’.⁷ She wears a gold ring with a quatrefoil bezel above the joint of the little finger of her left hand, and two rings, each set with a small black stone, above the joint of the little finger of her right hand, perhaps representing diamonds (fig. 12); below the joint of this finger she wears a gold ring with a green stone in a claw setting (fig. 13).⁸ The slim fingers of the left hand are arranged precisely to coincide with the uncut lower edge of the picture, and would have appeared to rest on the original frame (see Technical Notes and fig. 1); this would have augmented the sense of the illusion of the sitter’s presence in a manner similar to some Netherlandish portraits of the period.⁹

The Forget‐me‐nots

The sitter holds in her left hand a spray of pale blue small flowers, composed of five petals around an orange centre (figs 14, 19). They are forget‐me‐nots (Myosotis), which carry the same name in German: Vergissmeinnicht (fig. 16). Forget‐me‐nots were often invoked in medieval poetry as a token of love, and were associated with remembrance and the lasting promise of love in fifteenth‐century Germany.¹⁰ However, it appears that in Germany in this century the name Vergissmeinnicht could be applied to other similar blue flowers, such as a type of Veronica, or speedwell, composed of four petals.¹¹ A depiction of such a plant named ‘forget‐me‐not’ survives in the painting Girl making a Garland on the reverse of a portrait of an unidentified young man by Hans Suess von Kulmbach (about 1485–1522) from about 1508 (fig. 15). The girl forms a wreath of light blue flowers composed of four large petals, identified as forget‐me‐nots by an inscription which can be translated as ‘I bind with forget‐me‐not’; a garland of this kind would have been worn by a bride before covering her head after marriage, and the imagery appears to symbolise the commitment of a prospective bride to the sitter depicted on the front.¹² Owing to the blurred distinction between modern plant names and their historic counterparts it is not entirely certain that the symbolism of the Vergissmeinnicht was consistently applied to Myosotis in the fifteenth century.¹³ However, two sixteenth‐century portraits depicting Myosotis might well be associated with love and remembrance: the portrait of Juliane Halberg, neé Messing by the Master of the Angrer Portrait dated 1520 (fig. 17), in which the sitter holds a forget‐me‐not and a viola, paired with the portrait of her husband Ruprecht Halberg; and a later portrait of Mary Neville, Lady Dacre of about 1555–8 by Hans Eworth (about 1520–1574) (fig. 18), which appears to have commemorated the death of Lady Dacre’s husband.¹⁴

The Fly

Resting on the upper part of the headdress, to the left, is a fly (fig. 20). Similar flies appear in northern European portraits of the fifteenth century, as well as more generally in European painting from about 1450 to 1540.¹⁵ Examples in Netherlandish portraiture include the flies on the painted frames of the Portrait of a Carthusian by Petrus Christus (active 1444; died 1475/6) of 1446, and Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Man with an Arrow of 1470–5.¹⁶ A fly is also present in the South German Portrait of an Elderly Man of about 1475 in the Kunstmuseum Basel, and in the Portrait of a Young Woman attributed to Mair von Landshut (active 1485–1510), of around 1490–1500 (fig. 21).¹⁷ The motif of the fly resting on a woman’s white headdress is later taken up by Bartholomeus Bruyn in his Portrait of Margarethe van Houltz from about 1535–40 (fig. 22).¹⁸ The Netherlandish Master of Frankfurt’s Portrait of the Artist and his Wife from 1496 features a large fly perched on top of the wife’s headdress in a similar manner to that in NG 722, while another fly sits near the food on the table in front of the couple (fig. 23).¹⁹

Levey suggested that the purpose of the fly in NG 722 was to evoke admiration for the illusionistic skill of the artist, deceiving the viewer into believing that a real fly had landed on the surface of the picture.²⁰ Such instances of artistry are recorded in classical literature, for example in Philostratus’ reference to the illusionistic representation of a bee, and, it has been argued, may have been the inspiration for the inclusion of flies in painting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.²¹ The presence of the short‐lived fly, a sign of disease and death associated with evil and sin, might equally evoke thoughts of mortality, often a significant element in fifteenth‐ and early sixteenth‐century German portraiture.²² At the same time, a depiction of the fly could serve as a protective talisman against real flies and the evils they brought.²³ These allusions should not be interpreted as mutually exclusive: as John Hand has written of Petrus Christus’s Portrait of a Carthusian, ‘This fly can be interpreted in a number of different, but not necessarily contradictory ways: as a trompe l’oeil demonstration of the painter’s skill at realistic depiction, or as a talisman, protecting against [page 900] [page 901] disease, or as a kind of memento mori, a reminder of the nearness of death, which can be transcended through religious faith.’²⁴

The Sitter’s Identity

The top edge of NG 722 has been cut, and it is likely that the first line of the inscription has been lost. The inscription ‘GEBORNE HOFERIN’ identifies the maiden name of the sitter as Hofer.²⁵ Similar inscriptions on comparable portraits make it likely that the first line gave the woman’s married name.²⁶ While there existed a noble family of the name ‘Hofer’ in Bavaria, the name, as Levey observed, is common throughout southern Germany.²⁷ Although the textiles and fur the woman wears must have been costly, no further indications exist as to the sitter’s identity and origin. Her headdress, however, conveys her status as a married woman.²⁸ She faces right, not the more usual left, the direction that would frequently indicate that the portrait was part of a pair with the sitter’s husband, but some examples survive of pairs in which the female sitter faces right and the male sitter faces left.²⁹ Conceivably a portrait of the husband to whom the sitter promises remembrance was once paired with NG 722.³⁰

Attribution

The painting’s support may be silver fir, which grows in Alpine regions of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as in the Dolomite region of southern Tyrol, or northern Italy. Earlier opinions on the origin of the portrait were formed on the basis of style alone. The first recorded attribution for NG 722 was to the engraver Israel van Meckenem in 1826, when it was in the Oettingen‐Wallerstein collection (see Provenance). By 1854 Waagen had suggested the painting was the work of the Master of the Lyversberg Passion, a Cologne artist whose work had previously been regarded as identical with that of the engraver, and who was also believed to be the author of paintings now considered to be the work of the Cologne painter the Master of the Life of the Virgin.³¹ In the 1929 National Gallery catalogue the painting was merely given as German School, while Hugelshofer published it as Austrian, from the southern region of Styria.³² Gerstenberg believed the painting was by the Housebook Master, who appears to have worked in the Middle Rhine region of Germany, while Deusch attributed it to a Nuremberg artist.³³ More recent opinion has situated the painting in Swabia: Buchner in 1953 attributed NG 722 to the Master of the Sterzing Altarpiece Wings, and the attribution was accepted by Stange.³⁴ Levey found the parallels striking but the attribution unconvincing.³⁵ Brinkmann saw in NG 722 the same hand as that of the painter of a scene from the legend of a saint in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, attributed to a Swabian painter from the circle of Friedrich Herlin (about 1425–1500) and dated to about 1470–80.³⁶ He evoked parallels between faces, hands and colouring, but the similarities between the two works are not obvious.

The Master of the Sterzing Altarpiece Wings painted the shutters of a carved altarpiece made for the parish church of Sterzing (Vipiteno) in the Italian Tyrol documented as the work of the Ulm wood sculptor Hans Multscher (about 1400–1467) in 1456–9, and is therefore believed to have been a painter from Ulm, a highly prosperous imperial city at this period.³⁷ Several other paintings have been attributed to this artist on stylistic grounds, including a series of paintings now in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.³⁸ There are a number of resemblances between NG 722 and the Sterzing Altarpiece wing panels. One of the most striking is the similarity between the right hand of the sitter in the portrait, with its long fingers, and the left hand of the Virgin in the Sterzing Adoration of the Kings (fig. 25). Another is the way in which the further, proper left eye of NG 722 is distorted to slope downwards to a point: a similar characteristic is seen in the nearer, right eye of the king standing on the left. The prominent channel in the upper lip (fig. 24) and the cleft in the chin is also seen in both paintings and appears to be handled in a similar manner.

However, despite these similarities, there are clear differences between the painting techniques of the Sterzing Master and that of the painter of NG 722: the way in which the folds of the headdress in NG 722 end in a subtly shadowed straight hook is not mirrored by the manner in which, for example, the folds of the headdress of the Virgin in the Death of the Virgin in the Sterzing Altarpiece are depicted with continuous deep shadows joining the folds to the ends (fig. 26). The manner in which the hands are depicted in both works is similar, with the nails outlined and the bones prominent, but the flesh of NG 722 is depicted with far greater subtlety, without the dark outlining and more boldly highlighted and simplified depiction characteristic of the faces in the Sterzing Altarpiece. Although some of these differences may be attributable to the different function of the works – an altarpiece meant to read clearly from some distance as opposed to a portrait intended to be scrutinised closely – NG 722 does not appear to be the work of the same artist.³⁹ As Levey concluded, if the portrait is not by the same painter, it is by a painter of great skill, whose work has a relationship to that of the Sterzing Master, and who was probably from Ulm.⁴⁰ Painters in this region of Germany were [page 902] [page 903] becoming strongly influenced by the work of Netherlandish painters in the latter part of the fifteenth century, which may account for the use of the illusionistic positioning of the fingers on the edge of the frame, as well as, perhaps, the presence of the fly.

The portrait is the work of a highly sophisticated artist who has knowledge of how to achieve the maximum illusionistic effect. This is evident not only in the deceptive positioning of the fly (in scale with the portrait, as the use of this motif by the Master of Frankfurt, for example, is not, fig. 23) but also in other highly skilful means of creating a sense of depth, such as the use of shadow, the pushing aside of wet paint to create the sense of padding, folding and pinning in the headdress, and the subtle use of two kinds of rich dark self‐patterned textile. The painter has also carefully balanced the light areas of head, headdress and hands against the two dark patterned hues of the dress and background to produce an arresting concentric design; against this the trompe l’oeil of the fly is even more startling.

Date

The Sterzing Altarpiece commission is documented between 1456 and 1459.⁴¹ Buchner therefore dated NG 722 to 1460.⁴² Levey, Stange and Strieder however argued that the portrait might well be somewhat later, given that similar headdresses can be seen in paintings from southern Germany – from Nuremberg to the Rhineland – from around 1470 and well into the early sixteenth century.⁴³ Many representations of this style of headdress, particularly those associated with Nuremberg, show it worn with the longer end tightly bound underneath the chin instead of loosely draped across the shoulder, for example in the female pendant (fig. 27) to the German Portrait of an Unknown Man from 1472, in the 1478 Portrait of Ursula Tucher by the Nuremberg painter Michael Wolgemut (1434–1519) (fig. 28) and in the costume study by Dürer dated 1500 (fig. 29) and identified by the artist as an ‘Honourable female burgher of Nuremberg in her dancing dress’.⁴⁴ In a portrait of a woman holding pinks in the Thyssen collection, sometimes compared to NG 722, which [page 904] [page 905] may have originated in Swabia or the Upper Rhineland in about 1480, the sitter wears a similar headdress but it is arranged rather differently: the padding of the headdress is apparently concealed by the long end of the tube of cloth which is laid on top of it.⁴⁵ That portrait has a pendant of a man whose tabard is fastened on the shoulder with clasps not dissimilar to those in NG 722; he also has similar lacing at the neck.⁴⁶

No known dated rendering survives of the variant of the headdress as shown in NG 722, with one end draped loosely over the shoulder, but comparable representations occur towards the end of the fifteenth century. Several works by the Master of the Housebook from the last quarter of the fifteenth century depict women wearing similar headdresses, for instance his drypoint Phyllis riding Aristotle.⁴⁷ Dürer’s Portrait of Barbara Dürer from about 1490 (see p. 306, fig. 27) shows the white bonnet with one end falling down Barbara Dürer’s chest and over her shoulder, as does the sculpted Elizabeth of Hungary by Tilman Riemenschneider (about 1460–1531) in the altarpiece in Münnerstadt from 1490–1 (fig. 30).⁴⁸ Other characteristics of the sitter’s dress have, however, suggested a date of around 1470 or shortly after.⁴⁹ The slightly stylised nature of the depiction and the connections to the work of the Sterzing Master also suggest a date of around 1470 or the early 1470s.

Select Bibliography

Hugelshofer 1929, pp. 419–20; Gerstenberg 1931, pp. 65–9; Deusch 1936, p. 30; Strieder 1954, pp. 47–8; Lübbeke 1991, p.104; Buchner 1953, pp. 64, 194; Stange 1960; Levey 1959, pp. 106–7. Foister in Dunkerton 1991, p. 300.

Notes