Season's Greetings from akg-images
Wishing you a happy and prosperous festive season. Please note that we will be closed from 6pm on 22nd December - 9am 2nd January
30 November 2023
Our Christmas card for 2023 is taken from a panel of the Wilton Diptych - a portable altarpiece commissioned by King Richard II for private and personal devotion, painted between 1395-9 by an unknown artist. This English late medieval religious painting comprises two hinged wooden panels that open like a book, protecting the imagery within.
The inside left panel depicts a kneeling Richard and three saints, King Edmund the Martyr, King Edward the Confessor and John the Baptist, standing with him; and on the right, the Virgin and Child, surrounded by eleven angels. The most prominent colours are brilliant gold and blue made from Lapis lazuli, usually reserved for depicting figures of religious and social significance. When closed, one side depicts the English royal arms impaled with those of Edward the Confessor. Richard II adopted these arms c. 1395. The other outside panel shows a white hart or stag, Richard’s emblem, against a gold sky, with its neck encircled by a golden coronet and a golden chain. The stag is seated on a grassy meadow with rosemary branches, the emblem of his wife, Anne of Bohemia.
akg-images chose the white hart image for our 2023 Christmas card. We digitally brightened the detail and sympathetically restored the stag’s faded antlers before adorning them with bright Christmas baubles.
The Wilton Diptych is on display at the National Gallery in London. 2024 marks the National Gallery’s bicentenary- 200 years of connecting people with paintings. akg-images are proud to represent the National Gallery’s Picture Library.
.png "The original white hart panel and the akg-images reimagined image.")
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