Commonly known as Mabuse, which was a reference to his city of birth, Jan Gossaert was a member of the Antwerp painters' guild in 1503. The main historian of the Flemish painting, Karel van Mander, characterised him as the first "to bring to Flanders a good way of composing and painting religious works populated with nude figures taken from fables which was not then used in our country". This small panel of Adam and Eve is directly based on the famous engraving by Albrecht Dürer of the same subject dated 1504. Mabuse repeatedly returned to this theme and also represented other famous couples from biblical or classical traditions, always with defined sensuality and, above all, the dignity of bodily representation learned from examples of classical sculpture.