Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin,

1660s

This painting was attributed to the Utrecht artist Cornelis Poelenburch when it entered the Art Museum’s collections, but it was recently recognized as being by his last pupil and closest follower, Jan van Haensbergen. While the composition, with its cavorting putti and small-scale protagonists, derives from the master, Haensbergen’s figures are pudgier. The Virgin kneels on a tile floor in a vast space with immense marble columns on high plinths. The room is enveloped in heavenly clouds as Mary, who has dropped a small book, listens raptly to the angel Gabriel who announces that “Three days hence thou shalt be called forth from the body, because thy Son awaits thee, His venerable mother!” There are very few extant seventeenth-century Dutch depictions of this subject, one that surely would have appealed to a Catholic patron.