Saint John the Baptist as a Child with the Lamb, Oil on Canvas, 18th Century French School, Unframed

The red drapery is the only saturated colour in the picture, and the painter has worked bright vermilion arabesques across it. Everything else is held to browns, dull greens and the pale sky, and the sheep comes to the child across that single note.

Oil on canvas, relined, 15 x 12 inches (38 x 30 cm), unframed. Unsigned. French School, second quarter of the eighteenth century.

A young child sits on a low rock, one leg drawn up and the other extended, a sheep pressed against his shoulder with its head turned toward his face. He holds a slender reed cross with a lettered scroll wound around it in his raised hand, and a shallow bowl in the other. A flat orange halo is drawn behind his head. The reed cross, the bowl and the sheep identify him as the young Saint John the Baptist. Behind him a dark mass rises on the left, while the right opens onto a stretch of pale water at the horizon under rolled clouds.

The drapery is not modelled but drawn. A flat brown red is laid first, and the folds are traced over it in single strokes of bright vermilion, with nothing in between, while the animal beside it is modelled in the ordinary way, in soft greys and whites. The flesh is thinly painted throughout and the canvas weave counts through it, though the feet and hands are drawn with a care the drapery never receives.

The canvas is relined on a later keyed stretcher. The dark area along the left quarter is an old repaint, thickly applied and clearly distinct from the original paint beside it, and elsewhere the surface shows the abrasion and fine craquelure normal to an eighteenth century canvas.