Currently not on view

Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin

Jan van Haensbergen, Dutch, 1642–1705
formerly attributed to Cornelis van Poelenburch, Dutch, 1586/94–1667

y1994-12

This painting was attributed to the Utrecht artist Cornelis Poelenburch when it entered the Art Museum’s collections, but it was recently recognized as being by his last pupil and closest follower, Jan van Haensbergen. While the composition, with its cavorting putti and small-scale protagonists, derives from the master, Haensbergen’s figures are pudgier. The Virgin kneels on a tile floor in a vast space with immense marble columns on high plinths. The room is enveloped in heavenly clouds as Mary, who has dropped a small book, listens raptly to the angel Gabriel who announces that “Three days hence thou shalt be called forth from the body, because thy Son awaits thee, His venerable mother!” There are very few extant seventeenth-century Dutch depictions of this subject, one that surely would have appealed to a Catholic patron.

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Information

Object Number

y1994-12

Maker

Jan van Haensbergen

Medium

Oil on wood panel

Dates

1660s

Dimensions

39.1 x 29.5 cm (15 3/8 x 11 5/8 in.) frame: 48.5 x 40.5 x 3 cm (19 1/8 x 15 15/16 x 1 3/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Deborah Strom Gibbons, Graduate School Class of 1979

Type

religious art, oil paintings, paintings

Subject

putti, angels, men, Christianity, Mary, figures (representations), women

Materials

panel (wood), oil paint

William Beckford, Fonthill Abbey (until 1823; sale, October 11, 1823, lot 173, ?bought in); anonymous sale (possibly from John Farquhar and left over from the Fonthill sale of 1823), Phillips, London, July 9–11, 1825, lot 129; Lord Belper, Great Britain (until 1961; to Agnew); Agnew, London (in 1961; sold to Gibbons); Felton Gibbons, Princeton (1955–90; to Deborah Strom Gibbons); Deborah Strom Gibbons (1990–94; gift to Princeton University Art Museum).

formerly attributed to Cornelis van Poelenburch, Dutch, 1586/94–1667

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/171496508

<em>Well-selected and valuable collection of gallery and cabinet paintings, by ancient and modern masters</em>, (London: Phillips Son & Neale, 1823)., lot 173

7585 1823

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774717

"Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1994," <em>Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University </em>54, no. 1 (1995): p. 40-79., p. 46; p. 43 (illus.)

569 1995