Jan de Bray Haarlem circa 1627 - 1697

Pierre Louis Paul Randon de Boisset, Receveur Général des Finances, his deceased sale, Paris, Remy/Juilliot, 27 February-25 March 1777, lot 32, for 500 livres;
Lambert du Porail, his sale et al., Paris, Lebrun, 27 March 1787, for 900 livres;
M. Destouches, Paris, by 1792;
James Smith (1768-1843), Ashlyns Park, Hertfordshire, probably by the 1830s;
Thence by descent.

M. Le Brun, Galerie des Peintres Flamands, Hollandais et Allemands, vol. I, Paris 1792, p. 68, reproduced in engraving in reverse (as by Salomon de Bray);
J.W. von Moltke, "Salomon de Bray", in Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, vols. 11 and 12, 1938-39 (published in 1941), pp. 381-2, no. 32 (as by Salomon de Bray).

Although long considered to be by Salomon de Bray, and so published by J.W. von Moltke, who knew it only from the reproductive engraving published by Le Brun, this is a typical work by Salomon's son Jan de Bray.  In the setting, with the roughly painted crude cradle and the mass of golden straw and the soft, chalky handling of the figures, especially of the Virgin and Child, painted with a loaded brush, this painting is particularly close to De Bray's Adoration of the Shepherds of 1665, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague.

This picture, and the Adriaen van Ostade from the Fattorini collection (lot 23 in this sale), were both in the Randon de Boisset collection in the 18th Century.

ENGRAVED:
By Hubert, Paris, 1792, for M. Le Brun, when in the collection of M. Destouches.