Van Mander asserts that Goltzius took up painting in the year 1600 and that his first work was this 'cleen stucxken op coper' ['small piece on copper'], executed for Gijsbert Rijckersen of Haarlem, about whom nothing else is known save for what presumably is a record of his burial on 2 January 1605. Subsequently, however, Goltzius's friend and biographer states that the artist had previously painted a now lost portrait of a certain Tobias Swartsenburgh, leaving ambiguous the matter of which picture came first. Van Mander notes the deathly character of Christ and praises Goltzius for the figure's colouring, conception, and execution. He concludes by observing that Goltzius included a view of Jerusalem in the background and a hen with her chicks set back within the foreground, which he says served as an allegorical reference to Christ's lamentation about the city ('Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children ... '; (Luke, 24:28-31). The detail of a hen with her chicks, in which a blessing Christ is also to be seen, is located in the present work immediately above the head of the kneeling Magdalen, and its significance is doubtless to be understood as a symbol of caring and love as noted by Van Mander in his Wtbeeldinge der figueren ... (book 2, fol.132r).

The present picture becomes only the second surviving Goltzius painting on copper, the other being his 'Christ on the Cold Stone' in the Art Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, a work completed only a year or two later - it is dated 1602 - of comparable dimensions (47.6 x 34.3cm.) that is also cited by Van Mander. A preparatory chalk study for the present composition, incised for transfer and measuring 41.8 x 28.7cm. (fig. 1), is preserved in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (Reznicek, op. cit., 1961, p.251, K 46). Small discrepancies between the drawing and Van Mander's description of the painting led Reznicek to conclude that the sheet probably served as a study for a different composition, possibly that of the painting recorded in the sale of 1758. However, with the reappearance of the present work it becomes clear that the drawing indeed served as a modello for the copper, which, due to the correspondence in dimensions and description, can be identified as the painting sold in 1758.

We are grateful to Dr. Lawrence W. Nichols for his assistance in cataloguing this painting, which he has studied in the original and which he will include in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Hendrick Goltzius