The Donne Triptych (central panel)

Sir John Donne owed his career to Edward IV, the Yorkist king who had fought his way to the English throne, and he wears the proof round his neck. The gold collar of suns and roses with a small white lion hanging from it is the king's livery, and his wife Elizabeth wears one too. They kneel on either side of the Virgin and Child, with a daughter behind her mother. Donne was a Welshman who also kept a house at Calais, then an English town on the edge of Flanders, and he was in Bruges in 1468 for the wedding of the king's sister Margaret to the Duke of Burgundy. The National Gallery prefers a date in the late 1470s, perhaps 1478. The triptych belonged to the Dukes of Devonshire at Chatsworth until the Gallery bought it in 1957.