Mother and Child

Title: Mother and Child
Actual Title: The Madonna and Child
Artist: Artist unknown
Type: oil on panel
Size (HxW, mm): 324 x 229
Current Exhibition Location: Private collection
Lent By: George Price Boyce, Esq.
Catalog Number: 96
Catalog Page: 15
Catalog Description: A picture of the early Flemish school, painted about 1500 A.D.
Curators Notes: The Madonna and Child is a typical example of provincial Flemish painting around 1500. The naïveté of the anatomy, together with the close attention paid to the texture and fall of fabric, suggests an artist who is looking at the works of such famous painters as Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling and approximating their style for a local clientele.

In 1957, Friedländer attributed this Madonna and Child to the Master of the St. Ursula Legend, an anonymous Bruges painter from the late 1400s known only from a handful of works, none of which are signed. As more work has been done on the Master of the St. Ursula Legend, however, provincial paintings such as ours can no longer be attributed to him.

We would like to thank Till-Holger Borchert for examining the painting and suggesting that it was probably executed for the Bruges market.