Willem Key (1515-1568) attributed to “Saint Magdalene” 16th Century Flemish

“Saint Magdalene”

Oil on wood on two oak panels,
74x57cm
good condition

Willem Key (Breda, 1516-Antwerp, 1568)1 was a Flemish Renaissance painter specialized in portraits.
Biography
Following in the footsteps of his brother Wouters, also a painter, he moved to Antwerp where he was appointed in 1529 as an apprentice to Pieter Coecke. According to Carel van Mander he then went on to study with Lambert Lombard in Liège, where he would have had Frans Floris as a classmate. In 1542 – shortly after Lombard’s return to Italy – he appears registered as an independent master in the guild of Saint Luke of Antwerp, of which in 1552 he was appointed dean.
Registered in 1549 as a citizen of Antwerp, he died suddenly in 1568 after achieving wealth and a solid social position thanks to the portraits and historical paintings of him, painted with a learned hand according to the verses of Lamposonio to the portrait of him. Valued mainly as a portrait painter, those who posed for him included Cardinal Granvela and the Duke of Alba, whose portrait, preserved in the Liria Palace, is possibly the last thing he painted and close to another portrait of the same subject painted by Titian.
Van Mander also praised him for his religious paintings, some of them destroyed in the iconoclastic attacks of the beeldenstorm or iconoclastic fury. In a work like the Last Supper in the Dordrecht Museum, Italian influences, perceptible for example in the architectural backgrounds, and Flemish detailing coexist satisfactorily with the portraitist skills of the painter, who portrays himself as a beggar in the lower right corner. This ability to incorporate the novelties that came from Italy without having traveled there and combine them with the Flemish tradition may explain why Lamposonius or Van Mander considered him to be an erudite painter.
His disciple and distant relative was Adriaen Thomasz. Key, whose works are sometimes confused.