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.
