Early Netherlandish masterpiece for sale at Freeman's

Freeman's, in the USA, sells on 27 February 2019 a "Master of the Embroidered Foliage" Virgin and child, estimated at $150,000 to $250,000.

Which is very, very cheap for such a rare and beautiful work.

The description of the work is absolutely spot-on, the provenance complete for the last 100 years, the identification made by Friedländer...

This Master is, despite his restrictions and his dependency on older artists, one of the great unknowns of the Flemish painting, together with people like the Master of the Baroncelli Portraits. It has been postulated that there was not one Master, but a studio of multiple followers of Van der Weyden who all worked in a very similar style, and who now all get grouped together as "Master of the Embroidered Foliage".

A small Adam and Eve (50 by 33) was sold at Christie's in 2012 for 1.4 million Euro (against a 100K estimate!). The next most recent sale of a quasi-certain work by the master goes back to 1982 though, when a Virgin and Child at Sotheby's was already estimated at $160,000.

Boston

Munich

So this is an exceedingly rare work of genuine high quality. It's a partial copy after Van der Weyden, his beautiful Virgin and Child with Saint Luke. The original is kept in Boston, and three full copies are located in Bruges, Saint Petersburg, and Munich. The Munich copy is said to may have been painted by the Master of the Embroidered Foliage as well.

Comparing the Munich version and the one for sale gives an idea of the artistic merits of both. The Munich version is perhaps slightly more refined, but the difference is minimal. And the one for sale, which was intended as a stand alone work from the start (and this isn't a fragment of a full copy) has the bonus of a new background, not the one from the original but a very Medieval looking, tapestry-like scene with dogs and a peacock on stylized grass.

"Museum quality" is an overused term, but this work has truckloads of it and should fetch at least $1 million.

UPDATE: a reader informed me that the 2012 Christie's work shown above wasa later for sale with the Gallery Jonckheere in Monaco with a different attribution. It is no longer listed on their website, but some research showed that they recatalogued it as "Aert Van den Bossche", an artist active in Brussels and Bruges from the same period, who may be the same as the Master of the Legend of Saint Barbara. Another work previously attributed to the Master of the Embroidered Foliage (a Virgin and Child in Minneapolis) has also been reattributed to Aert Van den Bossche in the past.

UPDATE 2: sold for $2,050,000! Well deserved, I'm curious who bought it.