The Virgin Nursing the Child
Unknown · c. 1400
The Virgin stands with the Child at her breast, her head inclined, her mantle falling in the wide, soft folds fashionable around the year 1400. The statue is carved in the soft white chalk of Picardy, a stone that allowed sculptors to cut deep, fluid drapery and delicate features, and much of the painted decoration survives, so that the figure still has something of its original colour. The nursing Virgin was a favourite subject of the period, offering worshippers a tender, human image of Mary rather than a distant queen.
In the nineteenth century the statue stood in the cemetery of Saint-Pierre at Amiens, where a drawing in the Duthoit collection at the Musee de Picardie records it. It then belonged to Count Raoul d'Yanville in Paris and was sold after his death at the Hotel Drouot in February 1907, when the collector Georges Dormeuil bought it through the expert Marius Paulme. Dormeuil and his wife, Henriette Outhenin-Chalandre, gave it to the Louvre in 1935 while keeping it for their lifetimes; the gift was delivered in 1946.
Did You Know? Before it reached a collector's drawing room, the statue spent years outdoors in an Amiens cemetery.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.