Renaissance masterpiece attributed to Quentin Metsys purchased by the Getty for £10.6m

A portray believed to be a masterpiece by the Flemish artist Quentin Metsys was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum at Christie’s in London (2 July) for £10.6m with charges (estimate £8m-£12m). The work, The Madonna of the Cherries, dates from the 1520s and reveals the Virgin and Youngster embracing as she holds cherries in her proper hand.

In accordance with Christie’s, the The Madonna of the Cherries disappeared within the seventeenth century, reappearing at a sale in Paris in 1920 however with a number of additions, notably a translucent inexperienced curtain drawn throughout the window and panorama. “With this overpainting and a thick layer of discoloured varnish, the work was provided on the market at Christie’s [London] in 2015,” an announcement says. For that sale, the portray was attributed to Metsys’s studio and bought for simply £254,500 (estimate £60,000-£80,000).

The assertion explains that “it was solely after the transformative subsequent conservation that [unnamed] students had been capable of recognise the work because the prime model of Metsys’s masterpiece”.

The Getty says in an announcement that “the Sixteenth-century portray’s current rediscovery provided [us] a possibility to amass one of the vital important work of the Flemish Renaissance to seem in the marketplace in a long time”.

Anne Woollett, curator of work on the Getty Museum, provides in an announcement: “This portray represents Metsys’ distinct private type derived from his absorption of Netherlandish visible traditions and eager appreciation of great Italian inventive developments.” The portray will go on view within the Getty Middle’s North Pavilion in Los Angeles the subsequent few weeks.

The Madonna of the Cherries was initially owned by the Antwerp spice service provider Cornelis van der Geest in 1615 when Archduke Albert VII of Austria and Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia visited him and provided to purchase the portray. In 1628, it was depicted in William van Haecht’s’s work The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest.

Metsys’s earlier public sale document was achieved for Mary in Prayer at Kunsthaus Lempertz, Cologne, in 2020, which fetched €1.5m with charges (estimate €500,000-€700,000).