Old "Attributed to Simone Martini" is copy after Master of the Gold Brocade

Allgäuer, from Germany, sells on 11 January 2018 as lot 1989 a "Painter of the 19th / 20th century" Maria Lactans, estimated at 100 Euro. They indicate that it has an old attribution to Simone Martini.

It actually is a copy after the Master of the Gold Brocade, a composition I discussed at some length in a post from May 2017. The version for sale is probably later (as indicated by the auction house) and in any case definitely not by the Master of the Gold Brocade; but even so it is a very cheap copy (if you exclude shipping costs and the like when you're not based in Germany). If it would turn out to be 16th century, it would of course be worth closer to 5,000 Euro, but without provenance and seeing only the front of the painting in a photo, this is for me impossible to be certain about.

This composition is of course very closely related to the one by the Master of the Magdalen Legend I discussed last week; the main differences are the background, the clothing of the child, and the position of the hands. In every original by the Master of the Gold Brocade, this background brocade is symmetrical left-right, but in this version it is more some loose decoration, again indicating that it isn't an original.

The auction also has a decent and cheap copy after Van Dyck: lot 1997, a work of nearly a square meter. 300 Euro is a bargain for this.

UPDATE: the Master of the Gold Brocade, estimated then at 100 Euro, is now (19 April 2018) for sale at Christie's New York with an estimate of $6,000 to $8,000, described as "South Netherlandish School, last quarter of the 15th century". Good work by whoever bought this!

UPDATE 2: and it sold for a whopping $21,000, or 200 times the estimate it had 3 months earlier!