Madonna and Child

Around 1505 workshops in the Low Countries were turning out devotional panels of this size in quantity, meant for private houses rather than churches, and they rarely signed them. This is one of those, oak, about a metre high, showing the Virgin nursing the child. The name attached to it is Hieronymus Bosch, or a follower of Bosch, depending on who is writing, and neither version has ever been settled. The panel has stayed in private hands, which is part of the reason. The photograph in front of you was made by the laboratory of the Louvre in 1989, when the picture was in a collection in Ghent, and it is still the image the catalogue uses.