This is one of a pair of paintings on slate (RCIN 402780 and 406786) that can be seen hanging in the King’s Closet in Windsor Castle in a watercolour for Pyne’s Royal Residences. The gilt cushion-style frames seen here have subsequently disappeared. At this date the paintings were attributed to Nicolas Poussin; they are both recorded with this attribution in the Gallery at Windsor Castle in 1792 and in the Prince of Wales’s Drawing Room at Hampton Court in 1861 (nos 412 and 419). More conjecturally these two may be connected with a pair mentioned in documents associated with Frederick, Prince of Wales. On 4 September 1728 John Anderson was paid 4 guineas for restoring for the Prince a landscape and its companion by Titian and Tintoretto. In the 1749 inventory of the Prince’s residence, Leicester House, there is as ‘a Landscape with our Saviour on the Mount’ and ‘Landscape with Abraham offering Isaac’ both by Titian. RCIN 402780 doesn’t depict Abraham and Isaac, but it is possible to see how it might be thought to.

Whether or not these paintings match those at Leicester House doesn’t help with their attribution, as they are obviously not by Titian or Tintoretto, any more than Nicolas Poussin. Painting on slate was an Italian tradition dating from the early 16th century, which was particularly suited to the depiction of night scene like these. They would seem to belong to the second half of the 17th Century in Italy, when a number of artists, like Filippo Lauri (1623-94), were combining figures in an Italian Baroque style with landscape settings.

The many episodes of the scene - an angel in a break in the clouds, a rustic shelter, various frightened shepherds and a group of sheep - appear as scattered fragments of light, brought together by the suggestive darkness of the slate.