The Adoration of the Shepherds

For well over a century this picture passed as the work of an Italian. By 1777 it hung at Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlborough's house near Oxford, as a work by the Neapolitan painter Luca Giordano, and under that name it was recorded in 1902 in a bedroom at Arundel Castle, the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk. Only when the National Gallery bought it in 1962 did it arrive as a Le Nain, and the gallery still cannot say which of the three brothers, Antoine, Louis or Mathieu, painted it. The Nativity is set among classical ruins instead of a stable, an old image of the pagan world giving way to Christianity. The shepherd kneels barefoot, his feet dirty and wrinkled, close to a calm, idealised Virgin in red. Just above the wings of the angel in green, the Virgin's head from an earlier version still shows through the paint.