Wednesday 22 February 2017

"Circle of Michiel Coxie": follower of Laurence Neter?

Hargesheimer, from Germany, sells on 11 March 2017 a "Circle of Michiel Coxie" (yet another one) Adam and Eve, estimated at 3,000 Euro.

I can find no similar work by Coxie, but the same composition, although slightly smaller, has been at auction at Sotheby's in 2007; oin this case, it was a signed and dated work, 1639 by Laurens de Neter or Laurence Neter. I can't find the work at Sotheby's (often a sign that it was unsold), but the RKD lists it.

Much of the following information comes from an interesting article about Neter on Artwis.com.
Laurens de Neter was born in Poland ca. 1600. He learned painting from the Flemish artist Isaac van den Blocke in Poland, and then went to the Netherlands (ca. 1625), possibly to Middelburg, the city of his teacher. He went back to Poland in the late 1630s and presumably stayed there until his death in or after 1649.

Many of his paintigs were small scale works on panel (just like the one here), but usually they were typical Dutch genre scenes, not the somewhat archac and overtly religious Adam and Eve we have here. They show the same somewhat primitive way of painting figures though,

The Neter one sold at Sotheby's seems to be a better work though than the one for sale here, especially the Adam is much more realistic and skillful (the muscles on the back!); with Eve the differenes are less clear. So it is probably safest to situate this in the circle of or to a follower of Neter. It will struggle to get the estimate though, a 1,500 to 2,000 Euro estimate seems more realistic.

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