Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden

Rogier van der Weyden's shop in Brussels supplied pictures in his manner to buyers across Europe, and three in this catalogue carry the label workshop. Each shows the distance between his design and another hand in its own way.

A small Pietà with a kneeling donor in the Prado, from the 1440s, repeats a composition known in several versions. The museum says its elements came out of Rogier's workshop. The arched top with the sky was added later, no earlier than 1500.

In London the National Gallery holds a portrait of a young woman from about 1460. A similar, smaller portrait in Washington is securely his and of clearly higher quality, and the London panel looks like the work of an assistant or follower trying to match it. On its back is a badly damaged Christ crowned with thorns.

The gallery's Man Reading shows a young man with a letter before an open window onto a landscape. The eyes sit at different heights and the hands look boneless, the marks of an imitator or perhaps an assistant. For a long time he was called Saint Ivo, patron saint of lawyers, until it was found that the halo and the inscription naming him had been added later.