Master of the Embroidered Foliage

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Virgin and Child in a Landscape
Master of the Embroidered Foliage, circa 1492-1498
oil on panel
41 × 34 cm
Minneapolis Institute of Arts,Minneapolis,MN

Master of the Embroidered Foliage (active 1480 - 1510) was a Netherlandish painter or a group of painters who worked out of Bruges and Brussels.

In 1926 the German art historian Max Friedländer attributed a group of paintings of the Virgin and Child in a landscape, in identical poses to "Master of the Embroidered Foliage." The foliage painted in these works was likened by Fridländer to the repeated pattern of stitches in embroidery, thus the unusual name for the artist. The paintings show elements of previous works by Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling. There are at least 5 versions, including three in the United States: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Clark Art Institute. The other two are at Groeningemuseum, Bruges, and at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

The Clark Art Institute concludes their investigation of the paintings as follows: Our analysis, based on laboratory study and consideration of fifteenth-century workshop practices, demonstrates that these panels were all produced between 1482 and the early 1500s not by one but by several artists, perhaps sharing a common template for the main figures. Unless further conclusive evidence comes to light, however, we will continue to attribute the paintings to the Master of the Embroidered Foliage, while acknowledging that this is a catch-all name referring to a number of painters active in Brussels and Bruges in the late fifteenth century.^[1].