Flower garland around a Madonna and Child

Nothing in this wreath could have been picked on a single day. The green hellebore opens in the last weeks of winter, narcissus and hyacinth come in March, tulips in April, the guelder rose and the broom in May, and the carnations and roses carry on through the summer. Flower painters in Antwerp worked from drawings made across a whole year, which is how spring bulbs end up hanging beside high-summer roses on one canvas. The museum's index of this picture adds a hoverfly and a small tortoiseshell butterfly to the tally.

The author line carries one name. The Prado's catalogue of 1857, describing the Virgin and Child at the centre of the garland, wrote that the figures looked like the work of Cornelis Schut, and garlands of this kind were normally a job shared between two painters.

Two numbers sit on the front of the canvas, 222 at the lower left in white and 1219 at the lower right in orange, left there by the royal inventories and by the museum's first catalogues.