A Virgem com o Menino, santos e doador

Jan van Eyck died in the summer of 1441, and this small panel was probably still on his easel when he did. A Carthusian monk named Jan Vos had just been made prior of a charterhouse near Bruges and commissioned it, most likely from van Eyck himself, though a skilled assistant seems to have finished the figures after the master's death. Vos kneels at the right in his white habit, presented to the Virgin by Saint Barbara and Saint Elizabeth. In 1443 he secured an unusual privilege for the picture. Anyone who stood before it and said the Ave Maria, the prayer inscribed on the cloth behind Mary, would earn 40 days' remission from purgatory.