Rejection of the Sacrifice of Joachim and Anne

Joachim and Anne have come to the Temple with an offering, and the priest refuses it because the couple have no child. He leans out from behind the altar with a hand on Anne's shoulder, pushing her back, while she lifts a palm and Joachim, wrapped in his red cloak, is already stepping out under the arch. The painter set the Temple of Jerusalem in a vaulted Gothic church, and in its stained-glass windows he painted coats of arms, among them the red-white-red shield of Austria. Outside, birds wheel over green hills. This panel reached the collection by its own road. It came from an estate in Salzburg, passed through the Vienna auction house Dorotheum in 1910, and was acquired by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1940, joining two panels from the same altarpiece that had arrived in 1927.