The Nativity at Night
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
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About this painting
Three fires burn here and only one of them is earthly. The Child is his own light source, a pocket of radiance that pulls the manger out of the dark; the angel above carries another; on the hillside the shepherds' fire keeps its distance. Saint Bridget of Sweden saw it first — she gave birth to her son, from whom radiated such an ineffable light that the sun was not comparable to it. Lorne Campbell traces the design, reversed, to a lost Nativity by Hugo van der Goes. The Virgin's blue has darkened almost to black.
Sources: The National Gallery, London, 'The Nativity at Night', NG4081, bought 1925; object page read 2026-08-27. · Lorne Campbell, 'The Nativity at Night', in National Gallery Catalogues: The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings (London: National Gallery, 1998).
And she brought forth her first born son and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger: because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 6,000 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.