8 museomag   02 ‘ 2022 
© 
éric 
chenal 
REUNITED AFTER 150 YEARS  (1/2) 
ADRIAEN AND MARIA VAN LEYDEN, HUSBAND AND WIFE, FIND EACH OTHER 
AGAIN AT THE MNHA 
It was exactly 150 years ago since they had seen each 
other: two new faces among the Luxembourg Old 
Masters. How they came to be there is actually a very 
special story, which I am pleased to tell you here. 
As part of an exhibition project, I was looking 
for good portraits of the Flemish painter Nicolas 
Neufchâtel, one of the most important painters of 
the late Renaissance. He was trained in Antwerp but 
fled to Nuremberg because of his Protestant 
beliefs, where he became a famous portrait painter 
from 1560 onwards. The search had earlier revealed 
Neufchâtel’s impressive portrait of Valentin Kötzler, 
which could be purchased for the MNHA. 
From the distant past, when I was curator of the 
municipal collection of Nijmegen, the oldest city in 
the Netherlands, I remembered a portrait exhibition 
at which a large number of the external loans came 
from Zypendaal Castle near Arnhem. When I decided 
to consult that castle’s collection files, looking for por- 
traits from Neufchâtel’s era, I came across a painting 
that I immediately recognized as a copy after a work 
owned by one of the leading art dealers specializing 
in old portraits, Mark Weiss in London. I had seen the 
characteristic man with the red beard in his presenta- 
tion at the European art fair TEFAF in Maastricht in the 
recent past. It was certainly the same man, except that 
the copy was clearly of a much lower artistic quality 
than the original, was probably painted over a century 
and a half later, and showed only one hand instead of 
two as in the original. 
TWO COPIES DISCOVERED 
IN A CASTLE 
There was another important difference. A family crest 
was painted in the top left corner and the file on the 
painting gave information about the provenance that, 
all in all, made it possible to identify the man depicted. 
Whereas the model with Mark Weiss had no name, the 
copy after that original now offered a key to unlock the 
man’s true identity. It was also exciting that, in addi- 
Willem Key (1516-1568), Mr. Adriaen Dircksz van Leyden (c.1510/20-1562), baron of the Holy Roman Empire, c. 1560, MHNA, Luxem- 
bourg & Willem Key (1516-1568), Maria Gerritsdr van Leyden, née van Loo (1524/25-1562), c. 1560, Private collection, Amsterdam.