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Cuban artisan-market plaque — printed reproduction of a French late-Gothic devotional painting (St. Anne with a crowned woman and a younger female figure), mounted on wood

Object/Artifact

A rectangular paper print reproducing a late-15th/early-16th-century Northern European (French / Franco-Flemish) devotional painting, adhered to an irregular hand-cut wooden board and varnished, with deliberately abraded edges. The image shows, before a green-blue cloth of honor, an older haloed female saint (St. Anne) veiled in white and blue, standing behind and extending her hands protectively over a crowned young woman in jeweled dress with hands clasped in prayer, and a smaller young female figure, also praying, at right. Bare stained/varnished wood surrounds the print; the board has a live (waney) edge at right and a notched lower-left corner.

Cuban artisan-market plaque — printed reproduction of a French late-Gothic devotional painting (St. Anne with a crowned woman and a younger female figure), mounted on wood Cuban artisan-market plaque — printed reproduction of a French late-Gothic devotional painting (St. Anne with a crowned woman and a younger female figure), mounted on wood Cuban artisan-market plaque — printed reproduction of a French late-Gothic devotional painting (St. Anne with a crowned woman and a younger female figure), mounted on wood - Image 2 Cuban artisan-market plaque — printed reproduction of a French late-Gothic devotional painting (St. Anne with a crowned woman and a younger female figure), mounted on wood - Image 2
Cuban artisan-market plaque — printed reproduction of a French late-Gothic devotional painting (St. Anne with a crowned woman and a younger female figure), mounted on wood - Image 2

2025.25.4

María Teresa Cornide Hernández collection

2025.25

Maker: Anonymous Cuban artisan (craft/tourist market); not marked. The reproduced image derives from an unidentified French painting (see Research Notes). Date: Plaque — post-1978, when the artisan markets opened; also likely post-1990 (contemporary Cuban artisan production). Source image — French/Franco-Flemish, circa 1500–1510. Place of Origin: Cuba (the plaque; acquired in a Cuban artisan market). France (the source painting reproduced).

Wood

Paper

Materials: Paper print (offset or inkjet reproduction); hand-cut wood board; adhesive; clear varnish. Technique: Découpage — printed reproduction glued to a shaped wooden support and sealed with varnish; edges artificially distressed/antiqued to suggest age.

Good

Havana

Cuba

Caribbean

Central America

The reproduced image is a French late-Gothic devotional composition, c. 1500–1510: a crowned woman and a smaller female figure praying under the protective hands of St. Anne before a cloth of honor. The iconography strongly evokes the French royal type of St. Anne presenting Anne of Brittany (Queen of France, d. 1514) and her daughter Claude — compare the Primer of Claude of France (c. 1505, Fitzwilliam Museum), where Anne of Brittany is cast in the Marian role alongside St. Anne and princess Claude. The precise source (specific panel or manuscript illumination) is unconfirmed — treat as tentative. The plaque is a contemporary Cuban artisan-market craft (découpage on wood), a genre that proliferated with the post-1990 tourism economy. It documents Cuban informal-sector / cuentapropista craft production and the European religious imagery favored in the tourist trade.