Lot 1521 Dα

Everything in this portrait testifies to the high status of the sitter: The measured pose, the sumptuous clothing, the rich jewellery. This portrait of a young Gdansk patrician, painted around 1580, is an important work by Anton Möller, the leading artist in Gdansk at that time. It is also an extremely rare work by Anton Möller in private hands, which was for a long time housed in the important Cologne collection of Heinrich Neuerburg and was inherited in the family line.

The young woman looks at the viewer with a clear gaze, her hands are elegantly clasped together in front of her body. The even face, the fine hands, the upright posture testify to her high status, as do her clothes and her jewellery: the gold-trimmed bonnet and bodice of velvet, the cuffs with lace trimming and the gold chain from which hangs a finely crafted pomander. The sitter's rank is also made clear by the curtain behind the young woman - a pictorial element of the European state portrait, with which kings, princes and even patricians were painted. The pose, the format, but also elements such as the curtain show that Anton Möller knew the conventions of portrait painting as they had developed at the courts and art centres of Europe in the course of the 16th century.

Is it a wedding picture? Was there perhaps a male counterpart on the right-hand side? If we look more closely at the pomander, we see two small busts, probably a man and a woman, as figural decorations - maybe a reference to a wedding as the occasion for this portrait commission. There is no question that this is a distinguished Gdansk patrician: she is wearing the clothing of her class, which Anton Möller himself depicted in a publication on the fashion of Gdansk women, the book published in 1601 with the title "Omnium statuum foeminei sexus ornatus & usitati habitus Gedanenses" (fig. 2; cf.: Jasniewicz-Downes, op.cit., p.6f).

Gdansk was the most important trading city on the Baltic Sea, through which for example the important grain trade between Eastern and Western Europe ran. From the 15th century onwards, the city was the economic and cultural centre of Royal Prussia, and its economic power also helped the city to achieve a large degree of political independence. The prosperous Hanseatic city displayed its wealth and power in large-scale pictorial programmes, apparently competing with city republics such as Venice. Anton Möller was the leading artist who satisfied this demand for figurative art works. It is therefore no coincidence that a view of Gdansk by him was sent as a gift to the Venetian city secretary Marco Ottobono. Paintings such as "Allegory of Prosperity", "Allegory of Pride" or "Model of the City of Gdansk and the World" (fig. 3, National Museum Poznan) by Anton Möller bear witness to the self-confidence and the ambitious art politics of Gdansk in that epoch, when this portrait was also created.
Hermann Schnitzler called Anton Möller the "main master of north-east German painting of this time" (cf. certificate), for J. Tylicki he was one of the "most talented and inventive artists around 1600 not only in Gdansk, but in the entire north east German cultural region". For our young patrician from Gdansk, it was therefore obvious to commission her portrait from none other than Anton Möller.