Virgin at the fountain

This Virgin at the Fountain, dated to around 1450, derives from Jan van Eyck's celebrated 1439 Virgin at the Fountain in Antwerp, one of his most intimate and beloved devotional paintings. The original's combination of monumental figure style with miniature-like precision in a garden setting made it one of the most copied compositions in Netherlandish art. Jan van Eyck, active in Bruges in the first half of the fifteenth century and among the founders of Flemish painting, established the technical and aesthetic foundation on which all subsequent northern European painting was built. His development of the oil medium to achieve previously impossible luminosity and precision of surface gave Flemish painters the technical means to represent the visible world with a completeness no earlier painting tradition had achieved. His influence radiated from Bruges across Europe: Netherlandish painting traveled to Italy (where it profoundly influenced the Venetian tradition), to Spain, Portugal, and France, establishing a tradition of meticulous surface observation that was one of the defining contributions of northern Europe to the Western painting tradition.

The painting follows van Eyck's compositional formula of the Virgin standing before a fountain in an enclosed garden, rendered with the luminous oil technique that made his devotional images so admired.