Eine Zeichnung vom Meister des Wasservass'schen Kalvarienbergs?

The subject of this contribution is a silverpoint drawing on parchment in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, supposedly a Netherlandish work of around
1390. The drawing does actually evince close relations with early Cologne painting, particularly a triptych wing in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (WRM 737), commonly attributed to the ‘Master of St. Lawrence’. There are also close correspondences with the so-called Wasservass Calvary (WRM 65). Here, particularly the remarkable heads in lost profile give rise to the suggestion that the drawing might be a work of this anonymous painter and datable to the 1420s. The Master of the Wasservass Calvary is difficult to classify in the painting of Cologne of this period, hence the idea that he may have come to Cologne from elsewhere, possibly the Low Countries. The drawing, too, is in one respect atypical of Cologne, or even western Germany generally: the Virgin is not lying in bed but on her deathbed, a formula at that time current in the Low Countries and France.