Virgin and Child with a Donor

When the Museum of Fine Arts bought this panel in January 1885, it had been open in its first building on Copley Square for less than ten years, and early Netherlandish paintings were still rare in American collections. It came from T. C. Felton of Boston for $500 as a work by Hans Memling, and the museum's catalogue still gives it that name.

Specialists have not confirmed it. Max Friedländer, the German scholar whose survey of early Netherlandish painting gathers Memling's own pictures together with those of his workshop, his followers and his copyists, includes two other paintings now in Boston but leaves this one out. In this guide it therefore appears as the work of a follower, an unknown painter working in Memling's manner, possibly after his death in 1494.

On the hanging at the upper left are the painted letters NICOLAUS VO, the rest hard to read, perhaps the name of the man who prays in the lower corner.