Virgin and Child

Quincy Adams Shaw made his fortune as the first president of Calumet and Hecla, a copper-mining company in Michigan, and spent a good part of it on art for his house in Jamaica Plain, just outside Boston. He is remembered mainly for buying the French painter Jean-François Millet, but he also collected the Italian Renaissance, and this small panel was among those pictures. Shaw died in 1908, and over the following decades his family gave much of the collection to the Museum of Fine Arts. This one arrived in 1946, a gift of his son, Quincy Adams Shaw Junior. It is painted in tempera on wood, about half a metre high, a size meant for prayer at home. The museum dates it to the late 1480s or early 1490s and credits it to Ghirlandaio's workshop rather than to any single assistant.