The Virgin and Child before a Firescreen

Around 1440 other painters were copying and recombining the style that Robert Campin, the leading painter of Tournai, had worked out a generation earlier. The National Gallery catalogues this panel as the work of one such follower, who seems to have borrowed motifs from him and from Rogier van der Weyden, though it has often been published as Campin's own. Mary sits in a well-to-do Netherlandish room, nursing the Child, and a round wicker firescreen behind her head stands in for a halo, which is why it is known as the Firescreen Madonna. Through the window a street climbs towards a church. Not everything here is 15th-century. A 19th-century restorer added a strip along the top, the panel was cut down on one side, and parts of the carved cupboard and the gold chalice may be later work. The collector George Salting bequeathed it in 1910.