This composition was repeated by Jan Gossaert, his studio and his followers in other workshops, on no fewer than fifty surviving occasions. Friedländer believed that Gossaert himself created an original composition from which all the others were derived, but this hypothesis was tested recently, when the signed painting, which was in a Stuttgart private collection in the 1930s, appeared in a London sale room in 2005. This composition had every appearance of being an adaptation by a workshop other than that of Gossaert himself, and the date of 1550 on the painting confirms this. The attribution of the version here to the Master of the Prodigal Son is based on comparison with other versions of the composition, where there is a distinctive landscape background. The tradition of depicting the Virgin in an interior looking out onto a landscape or urban background was strong in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, but by this time it had become somewhat diluted as artists sought to be more inventive in the way they depicted the figures.

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