The Virgin and Child

Based on a lost work by Jan Gossaert, this composition enjoyed considerable popularity, even in the artist’s own lifetime. Recorded in Karel van Mander’s Het Schilder-boeck (1604), the painting was made when Gossaert was working for Adolf of Burgundy, marquis de Veere and represented ‘an image of Mary in which the face was painted after the Marquis’ wife and the little child after her child’. The disguised portrait of Anna van Bergen and her son, Hendrik, demonstrated Anna’s desire to emulate the ideal virtue and motherhood of the Virgin. The best-known version after this lost painting is the near-contemporary picture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.