The Virgin and Child by a Fountain

This is a fine copy after a work painted by Jan van Eyck in 1439, today in the Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The composition was immensely popular in Bruges, and at Genadedal in particular, until the first decades of the sixteenth century. The figures of the Virgin and Child, along with the oak-leaf motif in the Cloth of Honor behind them, are adapted in the Frick Virgin. Painted in Van Eyck’s workshop about the same time as the Frick Virgin, the two panels bear witness to the quality of the workshop’s output before and shortly after the master’s death.