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, L'Abondance (RCIN 408986) in 1848 and this much smaller painting a year later. Both paintings update the tradition of the allegorical painting, recasting the symbolic figures as characters in everyday life. The virtue of Charity is shown in art through a mother with three baby children. This re-telling is set in a cornfield amongst sheaves of corn, 'Charity', in a simple peasant's dess, has five naked babies, on her lap, hanging on her neck and sleeping in the corn nearby. She has enough of the milk of human kindness to offer a cup to the sickly infant of another mother, anxious and over-worked from raking the corn. This simple scene becomes a rustic Raphael Madonna in an effect reminiscent of the work of William Mulready (1786-1863).