The Young Virgin

Zurbaran painted this in Seville in the early 1630s, at the height of his work for the city's convents and monasteries. It shows the Virgin Mary not as a mother but as a child, a girl of perhaps eight or nine, pausing over her needlework. She has set down her sewing and pressed her hands together, her eyes lifted, caught in a moment of quiet prayer. Around her Zurbaran arranges plain, everyday things, a workbasket, flowers, a couple of books, each carrying a soft symbolic charge. The light falls gently on her face and hands and leaves the rest of the room in shadow.