Saint Jerome in his study

In a 1995 article, Ellen Konowitz identified a core group of five paintings historically attributed to the Antwerp glass-painting designer and graphic artist Dirk Vellert (c. 1480⁄85-1547), which she established as the foundation for a corpus of work by a distinct artistic personality working in Antwerp in the early sixteenth century (op. cit., pp. 177-90). Although this group certainly shows Vellert's influence, the paintings also have much in common with the Antwerp Mannerist painters. The artist's many idiosyncratic tendencies - his preference for tense, muscular figure types, twisting gestures, and quivering contour lines, for example - are most recognisable in an Adoration of the Shepherds in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille (inv. no. P 739); Konowitz thus named him the Master of the Lille Adoration.

The painting presents an amalgamation of three typically distinct iconographical traditions – Saint Jerome in penance, as a scholar within his study, and as a witness to a divine vision. This novel formula appears to have originated with Joos van Cleve, active in Antwerp at the same moment, who deeply influenced the Master of the Lille Adoration and the artists working in his orbit. Saint Jerome appears in his study with spectacles, an open book and a banderole inscribed with biblical text on the desk before him, objects alluding to his erudition and his translation of the Bible into Latin. The saint holds a bone fragment in his right hand, a reference to his time in the wilderness, when he repeatedly struck himself to overcome visions of the secular pleasures of Rome. Also common to both painters are the stoppered carafe on the shelf behind, often interpreted as a symbol of the Virgin Mary's purity, and the distant landscape beyond. Van Cleve's type is now known only from workshop variants and copies (such as the example at the Princeton University Art Musuem, inv. no. Y1928-40), while the Master of the Lille Adoration’s interpretation exists in around seven known versions.

The clouds at upper left link the painting to a lost pendant. As Peter van den Brink has argued about another version of this composition, also by the Master of the Lille Adoration, the present Saint Jerome may originally have been paired with a painting of the Holy Trinity set against a background of clouds (see J.O. Hand, et al., Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 2006, p. 151, no. 22).