Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Catarina van Hemessen is among the earliest women painters in the Low Countries whose work survives, and most of the handful of pictures she signed are small portraits, usually of women. This panel is an exception, a religious picture about 75 centimetres high, large by her standards, painted around 1550. She signed it in full on a rock at the lower left, in Latin, Catharina de Hemessen pingebat, Catharina van Hemessen was painting this.

The subject is the Holy Family resting on its flight into Egypt. Mary holds the child close, the things she brought for the journey lie at the left like a small still life, and behind them paths, tiny figures and a village church lead back towards high mountains.

When the Mauritshuis conservator Carol Pottasch studied the paint, she found a figure on the right that no longer shows, someone kneeling in prayer, apparently a woman in a long dark robe and a white headdress. The figure, perhaps the person who ordered the picture, was painted over before it was finished, and no one knows why. Since 2021 the panel has been on long-term loan to the Mauritshuis from a private collection.