GORTZIUS GELDORP | The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne

Jakob Johann Nepomuk Lyversberg (1761–1834), Cologne;

His posthumous sale, Cologne, 16 August 1837, lot 56 (where unsold);

Thence by descent to the Virnich collection, Bonn, Germany;

Anonymous sale, Cologne, Lempertz, 26 May 1971, lot 16;

Dr. Herbert Douteil CSSp;

On loan to the Mission House, Knechtsteden near Cologne, and then to the Diocesan Museum, Freising from February, 1998;

Anonymous sale, Cologne, Lempertz, 1999, lot 1051, when acquired.

J.J. Merlo, E. Firmenich-Richartz, H. Keussen, Kölnische Künstler in alter und neuer Zeit, Dusseldorf 1895, p. 268;

P. Clemen (ed.), Die Kunstdenkmäler der Rheinprovinz, 5.III, Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt und des Kreises Bonn, Dusseldorf 1905, p. 225, cat. no. 16;

H. Vey, 'Susanna und die Ältesten' von Geldorp Gortzius in Budapest', in Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 1987/88, vol. 48/49, pp. 201–02, reproduced p. 200, reproduced fig. 12;

H. Kier, F. C. Zehnder, Lust und Verlust, Corpus-Band to Cologne Painting Collections, 1800-1860, Cologne 1998, p. 222, reproduced;

Rotterdam 2008, p. 49, reproduced fig. 25;

Raupp 2010, pp. 162–66, cat. no. 24, reproduced in colour.

Rotterdam 2008, cat. no. 25.

The SØR Rusche Collection has been exhibited extensively over the last two decades. Please click here for further information.

Jakob Lyversberg (see Provenance) was responsible for amassing one of the most significant collections of old master paintings in Germany in the first decades of the 19th Century. Hailing from an old famliy of tobacco and wine merchants, Lyversberg acquired works of art as they came to the market as a result of the secularization of Cologne that followed Napoleon's occupation of the city in 1796. The resulting dispersal of the property of churches and cloisters enabled Lyversberg to compile a significant collection of paintings from the Dutch and Cologne schools.