Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows (left wing of diptych: Joris van de Velde, his wife Barbara Le Maire and their children with Saints George and Barbara)

Adriaen Isenbrandt painted this left wing of a diptych with Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, depicting Joris van de Velde kneeling in prayer, around 1518. The Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows devotion—focusing on the seven sorrowful moments of the Virgin's life, from the Prophecy of Simeon to her witnessing Christ's burial—was organized in the Bruges area as a specific confraternity, and Isenbrandt painted the definitive version of the subject now in Bruges's Church of Our Lady. This diptych wing shows the donor in devotional prayer, his identity and prayer directed toward the facing devotional image of the Seven Sorrows Virgin. The format creates a private devotional object that connected the patron's personal prayer to the institutional devotion of the Marian confraternity.

The portrait is rendered with skilled technique characteristic of Adriaen Isenbrandt's best work. The tempera medium, applied in thin layers of egg-bound pigment over a prepared gesso ground, the subtle gradations of flesh tone and the textural contrasts between skin, fabric, and background that give the image its convincing presence.