The Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and Barbara

Around 1520 a good many Netherlandish pictures were painted on cloth instead of wooden panel, and very few of them survive. Cloth was simply too fragile to last. This one came through. It is painted in glue tempera straight onto linen, with no proper ground under the colour, the fabric probably coated only with a size made from animal skin. You can see what that cost it. There are several tears, and in places the paint has worn so thin that the weave of the linen shows. The scene is the mystic marriage of Saint Catherine. The Christ Child slides a ring onto her finger, and Saint Barbara kneels across from her with her tower just behind her head. When the picture was sold in London in 1918, unframed, the sale catalogue listed it among the copies after old masters.