Although the painting entered the Museum as a copy of a work by Jan Both, it is recorded as an anonymous work by the Flemish school from the 1843 catalogue onwards. It is listed as such by Díaz Padrón (1975), and the attribution is maintained up until the last general inventory (1990). In 1976 Barghahn identifies it as the landscape described in the Buen Retiro inventory of 1701 and proposes it be ascribed to Herman van Swanevelt, an attribution that is backed by Steland (forthcoming).

The scene represents a friar kneeling at the foot of a crag covered in lush vegetation near the bank of a stream. The habit and the skull he holds enable us to identify the scene as Saint Francis meditating. On the riverbank there is another Franciscan monk, sitting with his back to the viewer, reading a book. At the furthermost end of the crag stand the ruins of an ancient temple.

As Steland points out, the compositional scheme repeats, in reverse, that of Landscape with Saint Rosalia of Palermo (P2063). Even the mountain in the background appears to be the same. But here the composition is enclosed on the left by a tree. The pictorial treatment of the leaves, branches and trunks of the trees as well as of the vegetation is characteristic of Van Swanevelt. The rocks on the right are also very similar to those in the Abduction ofApollo, one of Van Swanevelt`s landscapes executed in 1633-34 and housed in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. However, the dense vegetation covering the mountain crag places the scene in the orbit of the landscapes of the Galleria Barberini or of the Tobias and the Angel signed by the painter in Rome (Moldavia, Sternberk Castle, inv. 462).

It has not been possible to obtain an X-ray image of the painting and therefore the potential involvement of Jan Both in the background mountains cannot be ascertained, although the overall lighting is reminiscent of Landscape with Carmelites (P2058), here attributed to Both. As in Landscape with Hermit bound in Chains (P2034) and Landscape with Carmelites, the figure of the friar may be attributed to Andries Both (Text drawn Posada Kubissa, T.: Pintura holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado. Catálogo razonado, 2009, p. 329).