Jean Baptiste van Eycken (1809-53) was a pupil of Navez at the Brussels Academy from 1830-35. Thanks to a government subsidy he was enabled to visit Paris in 1837, and in 1838 he journeyed to Italy with A. Roberti and J. Storms, where he was galvanised by the works of Raphael and Fra Angelico. On returning to Brussels he produced popular works characterised by a sentimental and melancholy tone. In 1840 he was made professor of the Brussels Academy and became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1841 he painted two very large pictures for the Church of Notre Dame de la Chapelle, Brussels. His painting The Last Song of Saint Cecilia won admiration at the Salon of 1848. He was keen to reintroduce the practice of religious mural painting to Belgium, and went to Germany in 1848 in order to learn from the Nazareens Cornelius, and Kaulbach. His death in December 1853 resulted from a fall from a scaffold whilst engaged in this project, in the Church of Notre Dame de la Chapelle, Brussels.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert acquired two examples of Van Eycken's work, this painting in 1848 and the much smaller La Charité (RCIN 403628) a year later. Both paintings update the tradition of the allegorical painting, recasting the symbolic figures as characters in everyday life. In this case the virtue of 'Abundance' is presented as a young woman, kneeling over a basket which holds two naked babies amidst corn, bunches of grapes, barley, hops and pink roses; she wears a decollete white blouse with a red skirt; there is a distant flat landscape behind and a town with the twin towers of a cathedral.