(Nuremberg active in the 17th Century)
The Madonna and Child with Saint Elizabeth and the Infant Saint John the Baptist,
oil on canvas, 114 x 148 cm, framed

We are grateful to Rainer Stüwe for suggesting the attribution of the present painting to Anton Langmair. A written certificate is available.

A comparable painting, until now the only known work by Langmair, is in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg (see A. Tacke, Die Gemälde des 17. Jahrhunderts im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Mainz 1995, p. 155, pl. 105). Stüwe writes: ‘Correspondingly, we can find here similar head types with drooping upper eyelids, comparably highly placed round eyebrows, reddened ears, and, in particular, the same angular and crumpled structures of draperies. The hands, with their slightly mannered but nevertheless seemingly natural position of the fingers, are also closely related. In addition, the intimate and tranquil pictorial composition and the focused, variably nuanced shine of the nimbuses are readily comparable. Both this picture and the present Holy Family under discussion betray the extraordinarily high quality of the master Anton Langmair, who has certainly wrongly remained more or less unknown to date […]. To sum it up, this is, in my opinion, an outstandingly appealing work by a German master from the period around 1660/70 that may well be attributed to the Nuremberg master Anton Langmair. It is to be assumed that further anonymous German works of top-level quality dating from the mid-seventeenth century can be assigned to his oeuvre.’