Madonna and Child

Simon Vouet

National Gallery of Art

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.”