The Education of the Virgin Mary

The scene is a quiet domestic one. Saint Anne teaches her daughter, the young Virgin Mary, to read, a mother and child bent over a book. Jean Jouvenet painted it in 1699, near the end of the long reign of Louis XIV, when he was one of the busiest religious painters in France. He came from Rouen in Normandy and made his name in Paris with large altarpieces for churches and convents, all broad gesture and warm colour in the grand French manner of the day. Here that same manner is turned to an intimate subject, the everyday act of a girl learning her letters, lifted into sacred history. The painting now hangs among the French holdings of the Uffizi in Florence.