Flower garland around the Virgin and Child

This garland is painted on a sheet of copper. Painters used copper when they wanted the paint to sit on a hard, unabsorbent surface and keep its gloss, and the plates are normally small. This one is 84 centimetres tall, which is a large piece of metal to work on.

The museum's author line names Daniel Seghers for the flowers and then Cornelis Schut, with a question mark after his name. The Prado's catalogue of 1857 had no such doubt and simply stated that the figures were Schut's.

By 1794 the plate was at Aranjuez, hanging in the oratory, where the appraiser taking the inventory of Charles the Third's pictures wrote the painter down as a Theatine, or Daniel Serges. He had the wrong order and a mangled name, though he looked properly at the picture and noted the Child asleep in his mother's arms.

Down in the lower right corner of the front there is a small fleur-de-lis. It is the collection mark of Isabel Farnese, queen to Philip the Fifth, in whose rooms at La Granja the copper had hung.