(Antwerp circa 1527 - before 1581)
An extensive landscape with the Good Shepherd,
oil on panel, 51 x 66 cm, framed

We are grateful to Klaus Ertz for confirming the attribution of the present painting to Marten van Cleve. He dates it in the early 1570s. A written certificate (March 2020) is available.

Ertz writes: ‘The present painting can be said to be in very good condition. The scene depicted refers to a verse from the Gospel of Saint John, “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep (John 10:1–18). Together with two further paintings by the artist – Assault of a Peasant Couple, Vaduz/Vienna, Liechtenstein Collection (see Ertz/Nitze-Ertz 2014, cat. 85) and The Good Shepherd, New York, Sotheby’s (see ibid., cat. 6) – this wide, hilly landscape, with its high horizon and tree in the left foreground, belongs to the type of “pure” landscape in which thematic figural staffage is secondary. The latter picture is a variant of the painting to be assessed here. The most conspicuous difference compared to the Vaduz picture is the additional tree, which frames the right hand side of the composition. For both the present painting and the two comparative examples the layout is based on a simplified rectangular structure. While I am therefore of the opinion that all of these pictures date from the 1570s, I consider the painting to be assessed here as the earliest because of the wide foreground wedge, the fragmentation of the landscape depiction, and the still somewhat more elevated view.’