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| Samuel Baruch Halle "Good Morning, Mamma" (Mother and Child caressing) 1859 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| George Elgar Hicks Mother and Child 1873 oil on board (sketch) Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire |
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| George Elgar Hicks Mother and Child 1873 oil on canvas Manchester Art Gallery |
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| Sassoferrato (Giovanni Battista Salvi) Virgin and sleeping Christ Child ca. 1650-60 oil on canvas Galleria Estense, Modena |
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| Giovanni Francesco Maineri Holy Family ca. 1500 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| attributed to Nanni di Banco Virgin and Child ca. 1405-1410 painted stucco Bode Museum, Berlin |
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| Anonymous Neapolitan Artist Adoration of the Shepherds ca. 1630-40 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti Girlhood of Mary Virgin (supervised by her mother, St Anne) 1848-49 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
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| Gianfrancesco Modigliani Birth of the Virgin ca. 1590-1600 oil on canvas Musei San Domenico, Chiesa di San Giacomo Apostolo, Forlì |
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| Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli Virgin and Child in a Landscape ca. 1536-37 oil on panel Harvard Art Museums |
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| Giuseppe Nicola Nasini The Finding of Moses ca. 1690-1700 oil on canvas Palazzo Pretorio, Prato |
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| attributed to Bernardino da Asola Virgin and Child ca. 1525-35 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Bernardino Luini Virgin and Sleeping Child with Angels ca. 1510 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays Rest on the Flight into Egypt before 1765 oil on paper Musée du Louvre |
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| Francesco Granacci Virgin and Child (detail) ca. 1520 oil on panel Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller The Old Violinist 1828 watercolor and gouache on paper Musée du Louvre |
"If grace is born out of the harmony between the feelings of the soul and the actions of the body, the painter, in order to represent it, must learn through observation and meditation to recognize this correspondence between feeling and movement. . . . The female sex, suppler in its movements, more sensitive in its affections, where the desire to please arises as though of its own accord, as part of nature's great system, renders beauty more interesting, and when it escapes artifice and affectation, conveys grace in the most comely manner that it is given to us to imagine. . . . In childhood and youth, the soul acts in a free and easy manner on all forms of expression. The child's movements are simple, and his limbs flexible and supple. A pleasing unity and honesty results from this. Consequently, childhood and youth are the age of grace. Flexibility and suppleness are essential requirements for grace; in maturity they begin to fade, and in old age they are lost altogether."
– Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Lévesque, from Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure (1792), translated by Jonathan Murphy (2000)