Madonna and Child

1633

Simon Vouet

Painter, French, 1590 - 1649

Shown from the knees up, a young woman sits nuzzling a baby in her lap in this vertical painting. They both have pale skin tinged with pink. The woman’s body is angled to our right with her head in profile. A narrow, white scarf ties around her dark brown hair, leaving soft tendrils brushing the side of her face and neck. Her eyes are lowered, and her pursed, rose-pink lips almost touch the infant’s upturned face. A sea-blue mantle is draped across her back and one shoulder, and wraps around to lie across her lap. Ivory-white fabric drapes across her neckline over a voluminous, coral-red robe. The nude, plump child faces away from us, perched on the woman’s knee. He turns to reach fir the woman, so we see a sliver of his flushed, left cheek and the tip of his nose. He has curly blond hair. One pudgy hand rests on her neck while the other cradles her chin. A mustard-yellow cloth wraps around his hips and under his dimpled bottom. The woman’s left hand, on our right, delicately embraces his hip. She leans onto her other arm, propped on a stone ledge to our left, and that hand loosely holds one end of the baby’s yellow drapery. The scene is lit from the upper left, and they are set against a background that transitions from earth brown on the left to cinnamon brown on the right. The artist signed the work as if he had written his name and the date on the face of the ledge, just under the woman’s elbow: “Simon Vovet Pinxit.1633.”

Media Options

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Simon Vouet studied in Rome during the first decades of the seventeenth-century, succumbing to the pervasive, pan-European influence of Caravaggio's realist revolution in contemporary painting. In 1627, King Louis XIII called Vouet home to Paris to be his court painter, and Vouet refined Caravaggio's innovations into a style that would become the French school of painting so exquisitely represented by the Gallery's newly acquired Madonna and Child.

The cult of the Virgin was in full swing during this period, inspiring the king to dedicate the empire to her in 1638. Encouraged by the Counter-Reformation, Catholic societies advanced the idea of Mary as the privileged intermediary to Christ. Images of her proliferated, not least in the oeuvre of Vouet, who painted more than a dozen compositions of the Virgin and her son at half-length, many of which were reproduced as prints. A recent discovery, the Gallery's Madonna and Child seems not to have been engraved, and, also unlike the others, is signed and dated, quite rare in the work of the artist.

While the dark background and monumental composition remain from his Roman manner, Vouet's mastery of exquisitely subtle light, and his use of clearer, brighter colors — the strong blue and red against the delicate tones of white and yellow — mark his new French style. Supported by a classical stylobate, the Virgin holds her son on her lap, gazing at him adoringly with heavy eyelids. Her thick hair is pulled back loosely with a fabric band, exposing the ivory tones of her neck and shoulder. The Christ child reaches up to kiss his mother, his body twisting as he pulls her face toward him. This brilliantly executed moment expresses extreme tenderness and intimacy, as well as a prescient gravitas.

Madonna and Child bridges the Roman-period painting by Vouet in the Gallery's collection, Saint Jerome and the Angel (c. 1625), with a later decorative panel, Muses Urania and Calliope (c. 1640), completed with the help of his studio, the largest in Paris. The painting also establishes contextual origins for the Gallery's works by Vouet's successor in the royal court, Nicolas Poussin. Likely commissioned as an altarpiece for the private chapel of a wealthy Parisian, the painting provides a commanding anchor for the seventeenth-century French galleries.

On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 37

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Chester Dale Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 110.3 × 89.4 cm (43 7/16 × 35 3/16 in.)
    framed: 137.8 × 118.43 × 8.89 cm (54 1/4 × 46 5/8 × 3 1/2 in.)

  • Accession

    2016.20.1

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Listed 1644 in the will of Claude Bordier [d. 1644], wife of Etienne Lybault [d. 1641], to be given to the first of her four daughters who decided to become a nun, as payment to the convent she entered.[1] Acquired 1840 in Genoa by Eugène-Alexandre de Montmorency [1773-1851], 4th duc de Laval, Borgo Cornalese, near Turin;[2] by inheritance to his second wife’s brother, Rodolphe de Maistre [1789-1866], Borgo Cornalese; by inheritance to his son, Eugène de Maistre [1834-1908], Borgo Cornalese;[3] by descent in the De Maistre family; purchased 2014 by (Didier Aaron, Inc., Paris, London, and New York); purchased 26 May 2016 by NGA.
[1] See: Françoise de la Moureyre, "La goût artistique d'un grand financier au XVIIe siècle: Jacques Bordier," La Tribune de l'Art (June 2013): on-line at www.latribunedelart.com. This article was kindly brought to the Gallery's attention by Elodie Vaysse; see her e-mail of 12 April 2016 to Mary Morton, in NGA curatorial files. The painting was listed in Bordier's inventory at her death in 1644, and was presumably kept by the family for one of her daughters. Both the will, dated 23 January 1644, and the inventory, dated 11 March 1644, are in the Central Minutes of the Notaries of Paris (Minutier central des notaires parisiens), Archives nationales, Paris.
[2] The duke perhaps acquired the painting to decorate the altar of a private church he commissioned in 1850 for his villa near Turin. He had no children with either of his two wives, Maximilienne de Béthune-Sully (1772-1833) and Anne Constance de Maistre (1793-1882), and the villa and its contents passed to his second wife's brother. The duke's second wife remained in residence at the villa until her death. Her brother, Rodolphe de Maistre, also inherited from his brother-in-law the Château de Beaumesnil in northern France.
[3] One of eleven children, Eugène inherited his uncle's villa, and with his wife and their nine children constituted the branch of the Maistre family in Borgo Cornalese.

Associated Names

Inscriptions

lower left on the stylobate, with an umlaut above the V and a dot above each I: SIMON VOVET / PINXIT.1633.

Wikidata ID

Q46624642

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