Workshop of Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Workshop of means a picture made under a master's roof, often by assistants, and sold as a product of his shop. For Geertgen tot Sint Jans the label also covers a problem of dates. This Holy Kinship at the Rijksmuseum is dated about 1495, and tree-ring study of its oak panel suggests it may have been finished after Geertgen himself had died.

The picture gathers Christ's relatives inside an imaginary church. Saint Anne sits with the Virgin and Child, their husbands stand behind them, and Elizabeth is there with the young John the Baptist. On the altar in the middle stands a carved Sacrifice of Isaac, which Christian viewers read as a foreshadowing of the Crucifixion.

The panel has changed names more than once. A Rotterdam collector owned it as a work of Hubert and Jan van Eyck, and the Rijksmuseum bought it under that name at his sale in 1808 for 210 guilders. It was reassigned to Geertgen in 1885. Some later scholars rejected him and invented a separate Master of the Amsterdam Kinship, while the museum keeps the panel with his workshop because of its likeness to his documented work.