Madonna and Child

When this painting was acquired by the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery, it was thought to be a work by the Renaissance artist and inventor, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Early catalogues of the Gallery’s collection, issued after its public opening in 1817, praised the ‘grace’ and ‘elegance’ of this painting, noting in particular the ‘sweetness’ of the facial expressions of the Madonna and Christ Child.

The painting that visitors saw in the nineteenth century would have looked very different to how it looks now. In 1880, a renowned Leonardo scholar – Jean-Paul Richter (1847-1937) – prepared a new catalogue of the Gallery’s collection, in which he described this painting as ‘totally over-painted’. Not long afterwards, someone began to clean away the overpaint, attempting to reveal the true hand of the artist beneath. This difficult task was never completed and today the painting remains in a hybrid state of cleaning. Its condition makes it difficult to decipher the author of this mysterious painting but it is thought to be by an artist from Umbria in central Italy, perhaps working in the tradition of Perugino (1446-1553).