Acquired by the parents of the present owner at least thirty years ago;
Thence by descent.

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This triptych is made up of substantial oak panels that have remained remarkably flat, and have clearly led an exceptionally calm life in stable surroundings. The central panel has a single joint supported behind by a woven strip, which is fairly old and the joint has separated with little flakes lost all down its length. The frame, which has a central crack, and the black priming behind also date from that time. There is no sign of worm or any other structural problem in the original panels. The Adoration of the Magi. The extraordinarily intact state of these paintings suggests that the surface has been virtually untouched for centuries. The few signs of restoration are quite recent. Apart from the open joint with its small flakes there is a single significant loss, presumably from flaking, about half an inch wide, which runs vertically down for about four inches at the side of the king on the right, with two small lost flakes retouched nearby next to the star in the sky above, and one in the white drapery below. This upper right area still has some raised and vulnerable paint, with a little recent flake lost in the landscape behind. The upper left architectural background also has a scattering of minute specks of flaking. Elsewhere however the only minor imperfections are a little wriggling crackle in the foreground under the gold lid of the kneeling king's offering and near his feet, with one insignificant little dent in the Madonna's blue drapery. The exquisite flow of the brushwork has acquired great translucency over time with rich contours in the deeper glazes, and every minute detail is crisply intact. The Nativity. Here there are similar minute flecks of flaking in the architectural background in the centre, and some apparently slightly raised paint near the top. There is one small retouched paint loss in the sky under the arch with a little line retouched beneath it. Otherwise throughout the paint surface is in beautifully untouched condition. The Circumcision. There is a suspicion of raised paint also in the upper part of the painting, with one lost flake; and in the deepest madder glazing of the priest's robe in the shadow beneath his arm the glaze itself has flaked away from the underlying paint in one place. The left edge has one little narrow patch of retouching. As with the other parts of the triptych the paint has been preserved in exceptionally pristine untouched intact condition. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

That the author of this beautifully preserved triptych is still unknown may come as no surprise given the scarcity of documentation surrounding Antwerp painters at the beginning of the 16^th century; in the period 1490-1530 three hundred artists were registered in the Antwerp guild, but only about twenty can be firmly associated with a particular work, and it is thus one of the least documented periods of paintin🌸g❀ in western art.

The designs of each of these three panels are repeated in at least one further instance in other panels, all likewise painted in Antwerp in the first quarter of the 16^th century. That of the central panel recurs, with numerous changes to the detail and background, in a panel now in the Princeton Museum, attributed to the Master of 1518 by Annick Born in 1993¹ (an attribution nuanced today by the author who considers it closer to the style of the paintings of the group of the Master of the Antwerp Adoration). The design of both side panels recurs in a pair of wings, now separated from their central panel, that were formerly in the Bonnefantemuseum, Maastricht;² and the left hand panel is repeated in the left wing of an Adoration triptych in the Prado, Madrid.³ However, while acknowledging the present work's lin♎ks to all of these panels, which can all be loosely placed into the group of the Master of the Antwerp Adoration, Peter van den Brink and Annick Born both see it as by a different, superior artist who, while clearly inextricably linked in terms of design to the production of the Master of the Antwerp Adoration, bears some stylistic affinities wit꧙h the output of the Master of 1518. Therefore, while the present work seems to be the apogee of this general design in terms of quality, it is frustratingly not yet possible to ascertain its author, as with the majority of Antwerp panels from this date.

The production of a single design was not limited to a single Antwerp workshop, so that any attempt to determine a group of works from the same workshop cannot be based on design alone and must come down to a stylistic analysis and comparison. It is in comparing the execution and style of the present work with that of the Master of the Antwerp Adoration's accepted works that both its links and differences are best described. The closest similarities are born in the Triptych with the Holy family and music-making angels, formerly in a private collection, Rhineland.⁴ The facial types and the execution of all the details, such as the hands, are remarkably similar. Such stylistic links occur too with the large Adoration triptych in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, a painting for a long time mis-attributed to several different artists but now accepted by Annick Born and Peter van den Brink as the Master of the Antwerp Adoration.⁵ The Brussels triptych employs a similar overall conception, with remarkably alike Virgin and angels adoring the Christ child in the left hand wing, an Adoration of the Magi in the central panel, and a Circumcision in the right. The similarities with the eponymous work of this master, in the Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp, are less clear although still very much present, the facial features of the latter being more bulbous and caricatured, although the differences may be explained by the Antwerp panel's far smaller scale (29 by 22 cm).⁶

The anonymous author of the present work was clearly one of the more gifted Antwerp painters of the time. Few extant works demonstrate such expertise and precision of execution. Moreover, infra-red reflectography has revealed a number of pentimenti, where the artist's final execution is shown to ꦇdiffer from his original design, so it seems the artist was not some studio hand laboriously repeating his master's design, but was rather a creative master in his own right; see, for example, the dif𓃲ferences in the painting of the canopy, in the right hand wing, from the original drawing underneath (fig. 1). Generally speaking, the underdrawing reveals an adept and confident artist, and one who was prepared to make subtle changes to better suit the design. It is, furthermore, through a comparison of their underdrawings that we can finally prove that this and the Princeton panel, although of the same design, are by different hands (figs. 2 and 3).

While it is impossible to name the author of this exquisite triptych for the reasons mentioned above, Dr. Annick Born believes it to have been executed by an as yet unidentified master, active in Antwerp in the first quarter of the 16^th century, in the immediate circle of the Ma🅷ster of the Antwerp Adoration and influenced also by models issued from ♔the Master of 1518 workshop.

1.  By Annick Born in 1993 ; see. A. Born, 'Apport à l'étude du dessin sous-jacent et pratiques d'atelier du Maître de 1518 ,' in H. Verougstraete and R. Van Schoute (eds.), Actes du Colloque IX pour l'étude du dessin sous-jacent dans la peinture, Louvain-la-Neuve 1993, pp. 189-197, reproduced  plates 73-76.
2.  P. van den Brink, "Two unknown wings from a triptych by the Master of the Antwerp Adoration", in Art Matters, I, 2002, pp. 6-20.
3.  See G. Marlier, La Renaissance flamande. Pierre Coeck d'Alost, Brussels 1966, p. 143, reproduced fig. 74. Interestingly, the reverses of the wings of both the Maastricht and Prado wings depict exactly the same Annunciation.
4.  See P. van den Brink et al., Extravagant!, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp and Maastricht 2005-2006, pp. 166-68, no. 69, reproduced.
5.  See M.J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting. The Antwerp Mannerists; Adriaen Isenbrant, vol. XI, Leiden-Brussels 1974, p. 72, no. 52, reproduced plate 52.
6.  Van den Brink, op. cit., 2005-06, pp. 162-5, no. 68, reproduced.