Virgin and Child

This is the earliest dated work in this group, marked 1514, made when Ambrosius Holbein was only about twenty. It is a Virgin and Child in the northern manner, mother and infant seen close and half-length, the kind of modest devotional image kept in a home rather than set on a church altar. Everything is turned inward. The Child reaches toward his mother, she inclines her head, and the plain dark background pushes the two of them forward so there is nothing to look at but the pair. Devotional Madonnas like this were standard workshop fare across the German-speaking lands, the bread-and-butter commission a young painter was expected to master first. It is a quiet, conventional subject handled with real tenderness, at the very start of a career that would last only a handful of years.