Madonna met kind in een ovaal 1696

Hendrick van Beaumont created this red chalk drawing of the Madonna and Child in an oval, but we don’t know exactly when. What we can say is that depictions of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus were extremely popular in the Netherlands from the 15th century onwards. Here, the artist arranges his figures in an intimate and tender manner. Framed within an oval, the pair seem to exist in their own world. At the time, the Catholic Church was the primary institution that commissioned art, and images of the Madonna and Child were used to inspire piety. But it’s important to remember that artists also had their own agency and ideas about the best way to visually represent religious figures. To understand art like this more fully, we need to consider the religious and social context in which it was made. What did the role of the Catholic Church mean for artists in the Netherlands? And what other versions of the Madonna and Child were being produced at the time? These are the questions that we, as historians, need to ask.