Motherhood (Vierge au baiser)

Denis had been to Italy three times in the five years before he made this, and it shows in the way he arranged his own family. Marthe, his wife, holds their newborn daughter and brushes the sleeping child's cheek with her lips. The pose belongs to Italian Renaissance painters of the Virgin and Child, and the museum names Sandro Botticelli, at work in Florence around 1480, as the sort of model behind it. What keeps the picture in its own moment is the handling: colour laid down flat and almost without shadow, with patterned surfaces closing in around the two figures. Denis titled it Vierge au baiser, the Virgin with a kiss, putting a Madonna's name on his household. The painting then spent decades in private hands and had not been seen in public anywhere in Europe since 1971 when the Van Gogh Museum bought it in 2018.