Adoration of the Kings

In the 1830s this panel belonged to Karl Aders, a German merchant in London who built one of the most important English collections of what were then called the primitives, early painters from the Netherlands and Italy. In 1832, with his finances in chaos, Aders tried to sell his pictures to the National Gallery, then only eight years old. Nothing came of it, and this one arrived only, in 1880, left by the widow of a surgeon, Joseph Henry Green. Gerard David painted it around 1515, probably for an altarpiece on the life of Christ, and set the scene in the ruins of a grand building. The kings bring their gifts to the Virgin, Joseph comes down a staircase just visible at the edge, turbaned onlookers crowd the archway, and beyond the broken wall an ox and a donkey graze while life goes on in the town street.