The Virgin and Child

For most of its time in the National Gallery this little panel was treated as a copy. It arrived in 1860 with the whole collection of the Paris collector Edmond Beaucousin, 46 pictures bought at once, and it was one of 11 judged superfluous and offered to the national galleries of Scotland and Ireland. Six of them, this one included, were sent to Dublin that June. It came back to London in 1926, still taken for a later version of a much-copied Gossaert composition, and dimmed by thick discoloured varnish and overpaint. Cleaning changed its standing. Once the surface was clear, infrared examination found a free, sketchy underdrawing of the kind Gossaert made beneath his own paintings, and in the 1990s it was recognised as his original, painted in 1527. An engraving made in 1589 matches this version in details where the other painted copies differ. The cleaning also brought back the Child leaping forward with his arms out, and the fingernails of his right hand.