Madonna and Child

In April 1953 this panel was sold at Sotheby's in London as a work by Andrea del Verrocchio, the Florentine sculptor and painter whose workshop produced half-length Madonnas of this kind in the 1470s. Within a year it was in Florence, in the hands of the collector and dealer Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, who described it as a Verrocchio he had recently bought in London. In 1954 the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the American philanthropy behind hundreds of gifts of Italian painting to museums in the United States, bought it from him in a group of 16 pictures, still under Verrocchio's name. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, which received it in 1961, now catalogues it as an early work by Domenico Ghirlandaio, painted around 1470 to 1475, when he was in his twenties. In 1975 it appeared on the American Christmas stamp, and that year's Christmas stamps were the first in the United States printed without a price, because the Postal Service did not yet know what the new postage rate would be.