The Virgin and Child

This small panel of the Virgin reading with the Christ child on her lap owed its old fame to a single belief: that it was a lost work by Jan van Eyck, dated 1433. Known as the Ince Hall Madonna, after the English house where it hung in the 19th century, it entered a museum in Melbourne in 1922 as a van Eyck. Laboratory study in the 1950s, and infrared analysis in 2003, told a different story, and it is now given to a follower working in his manner rather than to the master himself. The care in the folds and the little book is real. What changed is the name that scholarship is willing to attach to it.