The Virgin and Child in a Landscape

The magnificently dressed Virgin Mary is seated in a garden, on a turf bench supported on planks of wood. The Christ Child is on her knee, playing with a whirligig. Pulling the string on the toy would make the part with sails fly upwards like a helicopter.

Such benches seem to have been common in small gardens or ‘paradises’ and were planted with low-growing, sweet-smelling flowers. Violets, strawberries, plantains, dandelions – two with ‘clock’ seed heads – and columbines grow on the bench and at her feet. The plants are quickly painted, so we can't identify every one.

The figures of the Virgin and Child paraphrase those in Virgin and Child with Saints Donatian and George and Canon Joris van der Paele by Jan van Eyck, dated 1436, then in the Collegiate Church of St Donatian in Bruges and now in the Groeningemuseum in the same city. The reference to the famous van Eyck would have been obvious to contemporaries.

Text: © The National Gallery, London

Painting photographed in its frame by Google Arts & Culture, 2023.