The Adoration of the Shepherds

Antwerp, around 1615. Rubens had been home from Italy a few years, and with him came the Italian appetite for a scene lit by a single flame. Jordaens was in his early twenties when he painted this one. The light is a candle held by a shepherd at the left, and it picks out a ring of faces crowding in on Mary, who keeps the sleeping child against her cheek. The Gallery in Athens names that pose the way Greek icon painting does, Our Lady Sweetly-Kissing. What the shepherds bring is what country people actually had, a bowl of milk and a rooster riding in a basket on a woman's head. The museum dates the canvas to about 1615 or 1616 by setting it beside a Jordaens of the same subject in New York. It reached Athens with the collection of Alexandros Soutzos, the lawyer whose will created the National Gallery, handed over to the new museum in 1901.