Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, After Raphael Sanzio, 19th Century Oil on Canvas, Framed

The Virgin sits in an open landscape, in a red bodice with gold sleeves and a blue mantle falling over her knees, a white veil on her head. The Christ Child stands at her left, naked, reaching up to take her hand and looking into her face. On the right the young Saint John kneels in a fur wrap, holding a thin reed cross and turning toward the Child. Behind them the ground falls away to a plain with a walled town and a church spire on the right, a line of blue hills across the horizon, and slender poplars on the left. The sky is a clear pale blue with light cloud. The modelling of the faces is smooth and rounded, in the manner of the Raphaelesque tradition, and the palette is held to warm flesh tones against muted greens and blues.

Copying the works of Raphael was a central practice in European painting from the sixteenth century onward. In the early nineteenth century, students at the academies of Paris, Rome and Florence were trained by reproducing the compositions of the Old Masters, and Raphael's Madonnas were among the most frequently copied subjects. These copies served as study exercises, as devotional images for private collections, and as records of compositions that were not always accessible to the public. A well executed nineteenth century copy after Raphael is both a document of the academic tradition and a painting in its own right, reflecting the training and the hand of its maker.

The canvas has been relined on a second canvas and carries small areas of paint loss at the lower right, visible in the photographs. It is unsigned and presented in a period gilt frame with applied floral corner ornaments.

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