John Downton was a painter, poet and musician. He attended the Royal Drawing School at a young age and studied first English then History of Art at Cambridge. He later enrolled at the Slade to study painting. Working mostly in egg tempera, the medium used by the early Italian Renaissance masters he admired, gave his paintings a luminosity and translucence. This technique, using egg yolk to bind pure pigments, had been revived by the Birmingham Group in the late 19th – early 20th century in the wake of Arts and Crafts movement, although by the mid-20th century it was rather unfashionable.

This is one of five paintings, spanning Downton’s career, presented to the Royal Collection by the John Downton Trust; they encompass portraiture, religious and naïve painting (RCINs 407243, 407478, 407479, 407480, 407481). This small head of a Madonna probably dates from the 1950s and forms part of the artist’s middle period when he was pre-occupied by religious subject matter and the Madonna and child theme appears in his work. Rather than Downton’s preferred medium of egg tempera it is in pastel and references early Italian Renaissance artists such as Botticelli and Piero della Francesca. Enclosed in a dark-stained wood frame the Madonna’s head is bowed in devotion, with her hands clasped in prayer.

It can be compared with the Madonna in Bolton Museum and Art Gallery (BOLMG:1998.324).