The Nativity of Christ

For nearly three centuries this was the left half of a single object. Painted in Antwerp in 1519, the Nativity was one of two wings that folded over a central Adoration of the Magi, the whole altarpiece owned by the margraves of Baden and kept in Basel. In 1808 it was taken apart. The central panel went to Karlsruhe, where it still hangs, while the two wings were sold at a Basel auction and bought by a local collector, Johann Conrad Dienast. This birth scene and its companion, a Flight into Egypt, later reached the Kunstmuseum through Emilie Linder, a Basel painter who left her pictures to the city. So the figures kneeling around the newborn here were, for most of their history, one third of a picture now split between two countries.