Master of the Spes Nostra

Only one painting is given to this master, a memorial tablet in the Rijksmuseum made around 1500 for four Augustinian canons, priests living under a monastic rule. The Dutch art historian Hoogewerff named him after it in 1937. The Latin words Spes nostra mean "our hope", an old way of addressing the Virgin Mary. Before that, the German scholar Max Friedländer had given the panel to another anonymous painter, the Master of Delft.

In the foreground a half-decayed corpse lies in an open grave beside the kneeling canons and Saints Augustine and Jerome, and an inscription tells the passer-by, "I am what you will be, pray for me." Behind them Mary and her cousin Elizabeth sit on a grassy bank. Hoogewerff placed the painter in Delft, others have proposed Haarlem or Leiden, and one scholar identified the four men as successive rectors of Mariënpoel, a convent near Leiden. The Rijksmuseum judges that no solid argument supports any of these options.