Saint Joseph

In the Spanish Netherlands of the mid-1600s, devotion to Saint Joseph was rising fast. For centuries he had been painted as a tired old man at the edge of the Nativity. The Catholic reform movement recast him as the protector of the Holy Family, a model father and a working man, and in 1679 the pope, at the request of the king of Spain, made him patron of the whole region, the land that is now Belgium.

Michaelina Wautier painted this Joseph in Brussels around 1655, a generation before that proclamation. He holds a spray of white lilies, the flower of his purity and of the old legend that his staff burst into bloom when he was chosen as Mary's husband. The picture is a pendant to her Saint Joachim, Mary's father, which hangs in the same room. Both belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor in Brussels, and when he left for Vienna in 1656 they travelled with the rest of his collection.