Four other grieving figures are present; they may be Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin, and women who followed Christ.

This painting and David's Adoration of the Kings, also in the National Gallery (NG 1079), were two wings from a single altarpiece.

[7] If they were separated at this point, they were reunited by 1831, when their certain history begins, in the collection of Karl Aders, a German merchant resident in London.

Both were auctioned again in August 1835 and bought by a Dr Willis, later passing to a surgeon, Joseph Henry Green, who lived in Monken Hadley, a little way north of London.

Green died in 1863 and his widow (Anne Eliza, d. 1879) bequeathed all the Dutch and Flemish paintings in the collection to the National Gallery, who received them in 1880.