Barent Fabritius, 'The Adoration of the Shepherds', 1667

Barent Fabritius’s bleak, shadowy stable is coldly lit. Fading evening sunlight glimmers beyond the open doorway and starlight filters through rolling grey clouds overhead – the light of the guiding star in the story of the Nativity. The rays radiating from the Christ Child in the manger are the main source of light, but even they bring little comfort. Only the deep, dusty pink of Mary’s gown and the shepherd’s extraordinary red hat bring a touch of warmth to the scene.

Nor does there seem to be much joy at the miraculous birth. Mary kneels, eyes lowered, to reveal the child, naked to show that he is human as well as the son of God. Behind her, Joseph stands, grave and still. At the baby’s feet, a shepherd clasps his hands to pray but with a puzzled frown. The others gathered round simply stare almost without reaction. Only the little girl with the pale face and the white bonnet has the hint of a smile as she gazes over at the infant. Behind them all, the donkey and the cow look on.

In seventeenth-century Holland, religious pictures no longer hung on church walls. The old, highly decorated Catholic churches gave way to the plain white walls preferred by members of the new Protestant faith (Pieter Sanraedam’s Interior of the Buurkerk at Utrecht shows what the new churches looked like). But the Dutch were a devout people, and many had small pictures that showed the New Testament story as if it were happening in their own time in their homes.

The Catholic fashion for depicting Mary as a religious icon also began to change. She had often been shown in flowing robes, sitting on a throne, often with a halo. In Protestant images in particular she became a humble and very real young woman from a poor background, more in keeping with the story of the birth of Jesus as told in the New Testament, (Luke 2: 15–16) – as Barent Fabritius portrays her.

Barent was the younger brother of Carel Fabritius, who had been one of Rembrandt’s most talented pupils. Carel died young, killed in the explosion of the municipal gunpowder magazine in Delft in 1654. Barent’s painting derives from Rembrandt’s versions of the subject. A version made by another of Rembrandt’s pupils is also in the National Gallery: The Adoration of the Shepherds. The two pictures share a very similar composition, but the tenderness and intimacy given to the scene by the glow of candlelight and a tighter grouping of the figures in that painting here gives way to harsh lighting and the stark reality of the holy family’s situation as refugees far from home.