The Sick Child

Gabriel Metsu painted this small, quiet scene in Amsterdam around 1660, a city that would soon be gripped by its last great outbreak of plague, which killed roughly a tenth of the population. A mother holds a limp, listless child on her lap. Their pose deliberately echoes old paintings of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ, lending an ordinary sickroom a note of deeper grief. The child's warm yellow dress and the mother's red skirt glow against the plain grey room. On the back wall hangs a map of Europe, and beside it a small drawing of Christ on the cross, quietly repeating the suffering below. Metsu tucked his signature into that map.