A Masterly Hand / Scientia Artis 9

63 Gerard Venner 2 62 Summary – The Provenance of the Statue of St Anne with the Virgin and Child in the Parish Church of Elsloo: a Reconstruction of the History of a Reference Sculpture The starting point for this article is the tradition, recorded by the art ­historian J.J.M. Timmers, according to which the St Anne with the Virgin and Child now in St Augustine’s Church in Elsloo was acquired from the Roermond Minster in 1848-1849. Archival documents support this tradition and provide additional data on the sculpture’s provenance. References to statues of St Anne and an altar of St Anne in fifteenth - century sources and to a­ fraternity of St Anne in sixteenth - century documents, show that the­ devotion to St Anne in the Roermond church, a Cistercian foundation, goes back at least to the last decades of the fifteenth century. It is very ­possible that the statue of St Anne now in Elsloo belonged to the old inventory of the Minster, which was closed from 1797 during the French period. The same can be said of the other sculptures in the Minster that are attributed – with ­ different degrees of conviction – to the Master of Elsloo: a statue of Our Lady of Vogelsangh, an Entombment group and a statue of St Bernard. ­ Pilgrimage to St Bernard in the Minster is mentioned in 1644. When the church was reopened for religious use in 1803 the statue of the saint was returned to its place.