National Gallery spends £16m on altarpiece by unknown artist

The National Gallery in London has purchased a 500-year-old altarpiece, *The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret and Two Angels*, for £16.4 million from an anonymous owner. The painting, created between 1500 and 1510, is of unknown authorship—experts cannot agree whether the artist was Netherlandish or French, with candidates including Jan Gossaert and Jean Hey. The oak panel was felled around 1483, and the work was first documented at the priory of Drongen in Ghent in 1602. It was sold through Sotheby’s with support from the American Friends of the National Gallery London and had been kept at the Lulworth Estate in Dorset, home of the Weld family.