Master of Hoogstraeten
Netherlandish · Antwerp Mannerism
The story
Like many painters of his time and place, this one lost his name and kept only his work. The Master of Hoogstraeten is a label coined by the art historian Max Friedländer, who gathered a set of panels by a single anonymous hand and named him after a church in the small Flemish town of Hoogstraten, where some of them once hung.
He worked in Antwerp around 1500, in the ornate, crowded style later called Antwerp Mannerism, and there is a clear northern-Dutch streak in his figures that has made scholars wonder whether he came from the Netherlands rather than Flanders. One suggestion even links him to a pupil of Hans Memling, the great Bruges master. The Madonna with Saints Catherine and Barbara in the Uffizi is one of the panels that carries his invented name.
