The Virgin, seated on a grassy bank retained by a brick wall, wears a blue dress and a pink mantle. St Catherine, wearing a gold dress trimmed with ermine and a dark-blue mantle limed with ermine, offers a pear to the Christ Child. In front of her lie her emblems; the broken wheel and the sword. St Barbara wears a red dress and a white mantle; behind her is her emblem of a tower. The small figures in the landscape are probably included simply for decorative effect. The Master of Hoogstraten was active in Antwerp in the early sixteenth century, and is named after seven panels from a polyptych of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin painted for the church of St Catherine at Hoogstraten, north-east of Antwerp. Little else is known of his life. Similar versions of this painting attributed to The Master of Hoogstraten are in the Benda collection, Vienna, and the Uffizi. This is one of several pictures in the Royal Collection which were acquired by Prince Albert in the late 1840’s. A relative, Prince Ludwig Kraft Ernst von Oettingen-Wallerstein, ran into financial difficulties and borrowed £3,000 from Prince Albert. Prince Ludwig’s collection of early Netherlandish, German and Italian paintings was sent to London as security for the loan which he was unable to repay and so the collection became Prince Albert’s property. After the Prince’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria donated fifteen of the finest pictures to the National Gallery; the rest remain in the Royal Collection.