Wooded Landscape

Close this altarpiece and there is nobody on it. Its two outer wings show a single forest, with no saints, no donors and no story, which makes them among the earliest Netherlandish panels given over entirely to landscape. On this right wing an ox and a donkey wade in a shallow pool among the trees. Their meaning was waiting inside. Open the wings and the same two animals appear at the manger in a Nativity. The Mauritshuis ties the forest to a passage in the prophet Isaiah, read as foretelling the Messiah, which blesses those who sow beside all waters and let the ox and the donkey roam. Gerard David painted the triptych in Bruges around 1510 to 1515. The New York collector Jules Bache bought it whole in 1928, and a few years later the forest wings were taken off and sold back to the dealers. The Rijksmuseum bought them in 1932 and has lent them to the Mauritshuis since 1948, while the Nativity is now in the Metropolitan Museum.