The Holy Family and Saint John the Baptist

In 1618 or 1619 a small group of Antwerp painters and collectors clubbed together to buy a Caravaggio, his large Madonna of the Rosary, and gave it to the Dominican church in their city. Antwerp artists suddenly had a Caravaggio to study a few streets away, and this panel, painted a few years later, seems to have learned from it. Jordaens pushes four figures right up against the front of the picture. Mary, Joseph and the small John the Baptist, holding his cross of reeds, all turn their eyes to us. The Christ Child alone looks away to the right, rosary beads in his fist, as if his thoughts were somewhere else. The beads point back to that altarpiece, and they also point forward, like John's reed cross, to the Passion. Behind the family a carved cherub with folded wings stands against a blue curtain. The picture was given to the National Gallery in 1838 by the Duke of Northumberland, and from 1862 to 1929 it was lent to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.