Birth of the Virgin

In 1903 the Moscow collector Dmitri Shchukin gave this panel to the Rumyantsev Museum, and from 1924 it belonged to what is now the Pushkin Museum. It did not stay long. At the turn of the 1930s the Soviet government was selling art abroad for foreign currency to pay for industrialisation, and in 1931 the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna bought the panel from a Berlin dealer. A picture made in Vienna around 1445 to 1450 had come back to the city where it was painted. The scene is a crowded lying-in room. Saint Anne sits up in a curtained bed, women lean in around her, and one of them holds the swaddled newborn Mary. In front, a young woman kneels beside a wooden tub with a towel ready for the first bath.