Studio of Bernard van Orley
Flemish, 1488–1541
Madonna and Child with Apple and Pears ca. 1530
Oil on panel
Bequest of Herman B Wells, IUAM

Bernard van Orley, known in his own day as “the Raphael of the Netherlands,” brought the style and subjects of the Italian Renaissance to Brussels. He headed a large workshop that produced paintings, tapestries and stained glass for Flemish aristocrats and their Spanish governors. His Madonna and Child uses a compositional format made famous by Giovanni Bellini, interpreted in the harder, brighter style of northern European painters.

Wells acquired this painting in 1967 from a London dealer and hung it in his front hall, where he enjoyed seeing it every day. Six years later, on a trip to Spain, he saw three paintings by Bernard van Orley in the collection of the Prado Museum. One, “so similar to mine,” he found especially striking: “even to my amateur eye, I could tell it was the same painter—the same characteristics of the face, hands, and general treatment of the subject. Naturally this pleased me very much.”

© 2001 Indiana University Art Museum
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Photographs of artworks: Michael Cavanagh and Kevin Montague.
Photographs of Herman B Wells: Courtesy of IU Office of Communications and Marketing.