A pupil of Gerard David, the Bruges painter Adriaen Isenbrandt shared his master's formal idiom and palette but developed a softer technique, often seeking more sensitive, emotional effects with his gentle figures. Isenbrandt frequently depicted the Virgin and Child enthroned or seated before a landscape. The figures here may be compared to their counterparts in the central panel of the artist's Altarpiece of the Presentation in the Temple in the Cathedral of the Saviour, Bruges (Friedländer, op. cit., X, pl. 106), but ultimately descend from Jan van Eyck's Virgin and Child by a Fountain (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; ibid., I, pl. 27), the poses of which they paraphrase. Gerard David had earlier quoted van Eyck's prototype in his Virgin and Child with Angels (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and the production of this type of intimate devotional image became a Bruges specialty. The use of a decorative architectural frame or aperture may acknowledge images like Rogier van der Weyden's Standing Virgin and Child in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (ibid., III, pl. 14). The porticoed throne room in which the Virgin stands is undoubtedly symbolic of her role as the Queen of Heaven (Regina coeli), while the suggestion of a pedestal or column on which she stands probably alludes to fortitude and constancy rather than Saint James the Greater's vision of the Virgin Mary on a pillar.

Sold with a photocertificate by Dr. Max J. Friedländer dated February 17, 1947, as Isenbrandt