Upper Rhenish Master
Holy Roman Empire · International Gothic, Gothic painting
The story
A walled garden no bigger than a sheet of paper, where Mary sits reading among saints, birds and flowers. The Paradiesgärtlein, the Little Garden of Paradise, was painted on oak around 1410 to 1420 and measures about 26 by 33 centimetres. It is the picture that gives this anonymous painter a name at all.
He is called the Upper Rhenish Master after the stretch of the Rhine around Basel and Strasbourg, where scholars now place the work. Botanists have identified 24 plant species in it and 12 kinds of bird, which makes it one of the earliest European paintings to show flowers this exactly. Many of those plants carried meanings tied to Mary. At the feet of Saint George lies a small dead dragon.
No documented painter has been convincingly matched to the hand. Names such as Hans Tiefental, an Alsatian painter of the period, have been proposed and not accepted. Two panels in the Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame in Strasbourg, a Birth of Mary and Joseph's Doubt, are grouped with the same master, though they are dated later, around 1430 to 1440. The Paradiesgärtlein belongs to the Historisches Museum Frankfurt and hangs in the Städel on permanent loan.
