The Holy Virgin and Child with the Milk Soup

This composition was one of Gerard David's most highly sought-after, with several autograph versions extant, the finest of which belongs to the Aurora Trust, New York. Other autograph versions are in the Palazzo Bianco, Genoa, and the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, while a fine workshop version is in the Deutz collection, San Diego California. In 1515 David ('Meester Gheraert van Brugghe') became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp, in order to obtain permission to sell his works in that city, and it is thought that the Milk Soup series may have been painted for the open market there. The present workshop version differs from the standard composition in certain nuances: the Christ-Child turns His head towards the Virgin; there are three apples on the window-sill; and the landscape glimpsed through the window is more extensive. All of the extant versions, including the prime version with the Aurora Trust, show an underdrawing transferred from a cartoon (see M. Ainsworth, Gerard David: The Purity of Vision in an Age of Transition, New York, 1998, pp. 295-308, figs. 284-94), as does the present version, with a characteristic pattern of dotted pouncing visible in the infrared.