Follower of Hugo van der Goes, 'Virgin and Child', about 1485

This triptych is made up of parts of three late medieval paintings: the middle panel with its original engaged frame has been inserted into an outer frame, and the two side panels added to it.

The central panel shows the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child. She wears a blue mantle over her head, and a blue dress trimmed with fur on top of a white shirt and purple underdress. A fold of blue material lined with fur, which appears to be part of the hem of her dress, rests in her hand. Her hair is long and loose, and she has a jewelled ornament on her headband. The naked Christ Child plays with a string of coral and probably glass prayer beads. They are strung on a green cord, and there’s a twig of coral mounted in gold at the back of his neck. He looks rather like the Christ Child in David’s The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor; he too has a string of beads slung across his shoulder. David perhaps borrowed from this painting or a common model.

The composition is based on a Virgin and Child known from a woodcut and several painted versions, and close in style to the work of the Master of Flémalle (though Christ does not wear beads in this). Representations of the Christ Child playing with beads are not, in fact, common; here the idea could have come from another Flémallesque source, Saint Luke painting the Virgin, known from versions by Colijn de Coter and van Orley. Mary is very similar to the Virgin Annunciate on the reverse of the left wing of the Portinari Triptych by Hugo van der Goes (Florence, Uffizzi); the infant Christ is not unlike that in the Virgin and Child (Frankfurt) which is attributed to van der Goes and which is in part based on the same composition as this picture.

The quality of this painting suggests it is by a follower of van der Goes rather than the master himself. Its artist was not as good a draughtsman as van der Goes – the hands are not as well drawn as in the Frankfurt Virgin and Child – but he seems to have been aware of his own deficiencies. Technical analysis shows that he made various changes during the course of painting and seems to have struggled to get the Virgin’s face right: he moved her left eye down, and it is now slightly too low. He might have been working from a design left by van der Goes, who was interested in Flémallesque models. The combination of ideas taken from two Flémallesque compositions may suggest that Hugo rather than a follower conceived the composition. It cannot have been a very finished piece of work, and was perhaps a rough sketch, or the follower who painted this picture would have had no excuse for making mistakes in drawing. Technical aspects of the inner frame suggest the panel was made in Brussels; perhaps the artist was an assistant of van der Goes who moved to Brussels after his master’s death in 1482.

There’s no indication that hinges were ever attached to the engaged frame of the Virgin and Child, and there’s no reason to believe it was originally part of a triptych. The outer frame and attached wings may have come from a painting of the Virgin as the apocalyptic ‘woman clothed with the sun’ (Revelation 12: 1) – the prayer inscribed on them was believed to secure an indulgence of 11,000 years if recited in front of that image.

The frames of the wings and the outer frame around the Virgin and Child probably come from same triptych; as these were made in the same way as the frame of the Virgin and Child, they probably also come from Brussels. The painting as it is now was in the hands of a dealer in Madrid in the nineteenth century. He may have owned both the Virgin and Child panel and the original triptych, but discarded its central panel – perhaps it was damaged – and replaced it.