Jan Provoost, 'The Virgin and Child in a Landscape', early 16th century

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 would make the part with sails fly upwards like a helicopter. There are people and buildings in the background landscape, but they seem not to have any narrative significance.

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. Resting on the bench is an earthenware pot in which grow carnations, protected and supported by a wooden frame. Carnations need special care because their heads are too heavy for their stems, and they have to be moved to shelter during cold weather. Jan Provoost seems to have liked painting flowerpots as well as vases of flowers and flowers supported on trellises.

The figures of the Virgin and Child paraphrase those in the 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 visual reference to the famous van Eyck would have been obvious to contemporaries.

The attribution to Provoost is convincing if allowance is made for the damages, especially in the flesh of the Virgin and infant Christ. The surprisingly blue landscape is apparently typical of Provoost, who seems to have liked azurite pigment and mixed greens. He painted relatively quickly and did not labour with enormous care on small details, such as landscapes, flowers, textiles and jewels. The sheep in the background have been reduced to summary dashes of white paint. The underdrawing is idiosyncratic, but completely compatible in style with the underdrawing in Provoost’s Last Judgement (Groeningemuseum), Glorification of the Virgin (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) and Zacharias (Prado, Madrid).

Infrared photographs and reflectography reveal a great deal of underdrawing, while a great many changes were also made during the course of painting. For example, the Virgin was drawn wearing a crown and Christ’s legs were in a different position; he may have been wearing a shirt. Provoost may not have run a large workshop and seems to have made his own underdrawing, whereas many artists delegated this aspect of producing a painting to assistants.