This small panel depicts a scene not from the Bible, but from fourteenth-century accounts of the lives of Jesus and Mary, in which Jesus says farewell to his mother before the Passion. The artist likely belonged to the workshop of Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, the earliest known artist to establish himself in Amsterdam. Jacob Cornelisz. developed an abstract, slightly naive style of handling figures and landscape derived from the school of painting already established in nearby Haarlem.