Artwork Details
106-5/16 x 75-5/8 in. (canvas) approximately 110 x 78 x 3-1/2 in. (framed)
Accession NumberThe Orville A. and Elma D. Wilkinson Fund
CopyrightEuropean Painting and Sculpture Before 1800
Color Palette(Church of Saint Francis Xavier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands through William J.M. Russel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands); purchased by the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields in 1972.
In a dramatic composition suffused with golden light, the Virgin and Child appear before a kneeling St. Francis Xavier. The scene served as an appropriate subject for the high altar of a Jesuit church in Amsterdam dedicated to the saint. At lower right is the coat of arms of Elizabeth de Goyer, a widow belonging to a wealthy Roman Catholic family and the one who commissioned this painting.
Though tolerated, Catholicism was officially banned in the Dutch Republic, and the church that housed this painting was hidden behind the façade of an ordinary canal house. Because of their shared faith, artists from the Catholic Southern Netherlands like Quellinus were typically chosen to execute altarpieces such as this for clandestine churches in the North.
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