Saint Joseph and Two Shepherds

This small panel, only about 20 centimetres high, was cut out of a larger picture of the Nativity, and at the top you can still see the trace of an angel's robe. Saint Joseph is on the right, with two shepherds behind him. The whole composition is known from a complete copy that was in a private collection in Berlin around 1925 and later passed to the Wildenstein gallery in New York. Another piece of the same Nativity, showing the Virgin in prayer, survives in Berlin, and when it was first recorded, in 1839, it was taken for a Saint Barbara by Memling. In the complete picture she was on the left, facing Joseph.

Both pieces came from the Cistercian abbey of Salem in southern Germany, which was dissolved in 1803, and a collector in Freiburg bought this one from a former monk. It was shown at Bruges in 1902 as a work by Dieric Bouts and long accepted as his, and the Louvre still lists it under his name. The museum's own commentary takes a more cautious view, following the Belgian scholar Catheline Périer-D'Ieteren. It calls the panel a product of Bouts's workshop by a follower of middling talent, painted in the last quarter of the 15th century. It came to the Louvre in 1927, a gift made through the Society of Friends of the Louvre.