Landscape with Saint John the Baptist Preaching

This panel is under 30 centimetres high, and most of it goes to the country around the sermon, a river, a town and rocks rising behind. John the Baptist preaches in the wilderness to a crowd that has come out to hear him, the gospel scene in which he calls people to repent before Christ arrives. Herri met de Bles returned to this subject more than once, and other versions are in Brussels and Barcelona.

A small owl sits inside the hollow tree on the left. The Kunsthistorisches Museum lists it, with a question mark, as a possible signature. The panel dates from around 1535 to 1540 and later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Netherlands, whose collection came to Vienna in the 17th century.