Pierre Rosenberg considers it is possible to tell the difference between the work of the three Le Nain brothers. According to him, “La Nativite de la Vierge” is a picture on which two of the brothers collaborated. One painted Mary and the angel who is attending her, another the remaining figures, and they are by the same hand as painted “L'atelier de peintre” at Vassar College. According to Cuzin, this picture dates from after 1648 and can thus only be the work of Mathieu. Rosenberg goes on to divide the works that have been ascribed to Le Nain into three categories: those by the hand that painted the Mary group, those that must be the work of the person responsible for the elegant angels in the background, and finally those which, on account of their size, motif or the range of colours, form a unit in the production of the brothers: “les petites scenes de genre” and “les portraits collectifs”. A few years ago Rosenberg wrote that this analysis “has on the whole been generally accepted”. His reasoning, however, rests on a very flimsy foundation. “La Nativite” may very well be a composition by an artist who chose colours, outlines and light in order to show that Mary and her attendant angel are part of reality, while the light and airy angels belong to another world. Furthermore, the painting is unsigned, which is a drawback if it is to be used to find a solution to the problem of “Le Nain"—it was only attributed to the brothers in 1797. Rosenberg does not give any real reasons for assigning a large number of works to different artists—he obviously relies on others seeing what he sees. But this author does not. The attributions he makes do not agree with those made by Blunt, either. The latter considers that several of the works that Rosenberg assigns to Mathieu were not painted by any of the brothers. Neither have any other reliable facts about Matheiu emerged. It is true M. de Buttet thinks that some documents newly discovered in archives show that Mathieu was also an engineer and the author of a manuscript on the river Somme. But even this thesis is weakly supported.
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