THE WORKSHOP OF Quinten Metsys (1465/66–1530) produced a number of variant versions of paintings of Christ blessing and the Virgin in adoration, some of them diptychs, with varying degrees of participation by Metsys himself. His influence was such that there are also many variants by artists in his circle, as well as many later copies. In January 2006 the present writers discovered a small painting depicting Christ blessing, hanging in Holy Trinity Church, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Although clearly early Netherlandish, the painting (Fig.1), hereafter called the Bradford-on-Avon Christ, was displayed in a nineteenth-century-style frame which bore an erroneous attribution to the Spanish painter Luis de Morales (1509–86). However, the exceptionally fine detailing and brushwork appeared typical of Quinten Metsys.

ONE OF THE GREAT treasures of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, is Jan Gossaert’s portrait of an unknown man, thought to be a banker or a merchant, seated in his office (Fig.12). The discovery of a watercolour (Fig.13) in the Snouck van Loosen Stichting in Enkhuizen throws light on the identity of the sitter in this remarkable portrait.

JAN GOSSAERT'S Adoration of the Kings (Fig.20) is signed in two places and is generally dated between c.1510 and c.1515. It was first mentioned in 1600, when it was in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin in the church of the Benedictine abbey of St Adrian at Geraardsbergen (Grammont) in East Flanders, south of Ghent and west of Brussels. In August 1600 Albert and Isabella, the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, returning from Oudenaarde to Brussels, visited the abbey, saw the painting and asked to have it. On 5th April 1601 Albert authorised a payment of ‘2,100 livres de 40 gros’ to the abbot for its purchase and on 18th May 1601 it was recorded that the painter Gijsbrecht van Veen, residing in Brussels, had been sent to Geraardsbergen to buy from the Abbey of ‘St Andrew’ the painting in oil on panel of the Adoration of the Three Kings or Magi, 23⁄4 ells high by 21⁄2 ells wide, with its plain frame. It was to be placed on the high altar of the chapel of the palace in Brussels. The picture was reframed and installed in the chapel in 1603. In 1696 Gislenus Coucke, afterwards (1703–13) abbot of St Adrian’s, noted that, at Geraardsbergen, a copy had replaced the original, which had been removed to Brussels; the copy was still at Geraardsbergen at the end of the eighteenth century.

THE BRITISH MUSEUM owns two drawings illustrating scenes from the parable of the Good Samaritan, The Samaritan carrying the wounded man on his horse and The Samaritan paying the innkeeper (Figs.22 and 23). Each measuring 27 by 40 cm., they have a monumentality that derives from the closeness of the figures to the picture plane, clear contours and an elaborate modelling through hatching, dark washes in ink and white highlights. The first of these drawings is signed ‘WCrabeth’. In 1932 A.E. Popham attributed them to Wouter Crabeth (died 1589), the famous glass-painter from Gouda who, together with his brother Dirck (died 1574), played a major part in the stained-glass decoration of Gouda’s St John’s church between 1555 and 1571. They still carry this name in the online inventory of the British Museum, although Zsuzsanna van Ruyven-Zeman, who painstakingly established a core of smaller drawings and glass panels attributable to the master, rejected this authorship outright. The drawings she accepts (such as Fig.21) show the same dynamism, elongated figures and Frans Floris-like bearded heads as Wouter Crabeth’s well-documented cartoons (life-size working drawings) for the Gouda church windows – features which are clearly absent in the two Good Samaritan drawings.

TWO FOLIOS FROM what is known as the Antwerp sketchbook, plausibly attributed to Anthony van Dyck, show a series of sketches of a Boy boxer and a Boy with a goose, both of which are drawings after sculpture (Fig.31). Whether or not the sketchbook can indeed be attributed to Van Dyck is not our concern here, but it is important to note that these sketches are almost certainly copied from Rubens’s so-called pocketbook, as has been observed by other scholars, and the present writer has argued elsewhere that the Antwerp sketchbook is largely a compilation after Rubens’s lost pocketbook and other drawings by him. The sketches on these two folios, and the sculptures represented, are a source for figures in a number of works by Rubens, and so help date this part of the original Rubens pocketbook. The drawings are of particular interest because Rubens singled out these images in an important early tract he wrote on exemplary antique sculpture portraying children.

HENDRICK TER BRUGGHEN (1588–1629) captured the rhythms of music in the very way he composed his paintings. His musicians lean into their instruments, their bodies alive with the joy of the sounds they make, whether coaxed from a violin, lute, recorder or bagpipe. In the remarkable painting under discussion (Fig.40), a bagpipe player, seen in strict profile, squeezes the leather bag between his forearms as he blows through the instrument’s pipe and fingers a tune on the chanter. Two large drones, composed of different wooden sections, rest on his bare shoulder. The interlocking rhythms of this ensemble – the broad, round shapes of the musician’s shoulder, beret and brown bagpipe bag, the flowing patterns of folds in his creamy shirt and taupe robe, the pronounced diagonals of the drones and pipe, and the verticality of the chanter – parallel those of a musical score. Broad, fulsome notes, quickly cadenced flourishes and strong beats not only punctuate melodies with dynamic accents but also culminate in a well-defined and emphatic finale.