Standing Virgin and Child

Hans Memling made this small devotional panel near the end of his life, around 1490, in Bruges. For most of the 15th century Bruges had been one of the richest trading cities in Europe, and Memling had grown wealthy as its favourite painter, turning out serene, jewel-bright Madonnas for merchants and their families to pray before at home. By the time of this picture the city's fortune was quietly turning, its harbour channel silting up and trade beginning to drift toward Antwerp. None of that anxiety shows here. The Virgin stands calm and self-contained, the child on her arm, the whole thing made to be held close and looked at slowly. Memling died in 1494, only a few years after this. The panel is now among the early Netherlandish works in the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest.