Workshop of Albrecht Durer
Nuremburg, first decade of the 16th CenturyThe Madonna and Child on a grassy bank.
This drawing from the workshop of Albrecht Durer dates from the period when the artist returned from Venice in 1503 and set up his studio in Nuremberg. The subject of the Virgin Mary holding a child and seated on a grassy bank was popular in early German Renaissance paintings, drawings and prints, both with artists and their patrons.
Dr Gulia Bartrum when looking at our drawing and discussing it with us felt that it was probably done by the Durer workshop from a now lost original by the Master. It would have serves as an aide-memoire for use in one of their own compositions, either a painting or as a finished drawing for sale by the workshop. The Durer monogram and date of 1503, which appears to be by the same hand, would fit in with what is known of the workshop practice. With Guilia Bartrum we compared the actual drawing with studies of the same subject in the British Museum. When looking through W.V.Strauss, The Complete Drawings of Albrecht Durer, New York. 1974, we discovered a drawing at the Universitstätsbibliothek, Erlangen (XwIII/3, P699, page 3116) in which our drawing or the original by Durer is copied very closely. Winkler believed that the studies in the Erlangen drawing were copied from lost Durer originals by the Master “INAS” who also copied three other lost Durer drawings.