The saint in this painting can be identified by the knife in his right hand - the tool with which he was skinned. The work is part of a set of four hermits, although it is unusual to see this saint represented in a penitent manner, in a landscape, devoting himself to meditation and contemplation.

The painting is among a group of eight full-length single-figure composition of saints by Ribera that in 1658 were in the Madrid collection of Don Jerónimo de la Torre, a member of the Royal Council and secretary of State of Flanders. The series included four pictures that are now in the Prado -this Saint Bartholomew, Saint Mary of Egipt (P01106), Saint John the Baptist in the Desert (P01108), and Mary Magdalene (P01103) - and for others, of Saints Onophrius, Paul the Hermit, Agnes, and Sebastian. The entailed collection to which these pictures belonged was dispersed from 1718 on, and the four Prado paintings are subsequently recorded in the 1772 inventory of the Palacio Real in Madrid as having recently entered the royal collection from that of the Marqués de los Llanos, almost certainly Gabriel de Olmedo y Aguilar (1704-1758). It was previously thought that the Prado series had been conceived as a quartet that paired off two young male and female saints, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene, with an older pair, Bartholomew and Mary of Egypt; now that we know that these paintings formed part of a larger group, the idea should be abandoned.

Sometime between 1718 and 1772, the four paintings now in the Prado had a strip of canvas about 20 inches (50 cm) wide added to the left or right side, rendering each one almost square in format, presumably for decorative purposes (Finaldi, G.: Jusepe de Ribera´s Mary Magdalene in a new context, Meadows, Southern Methodist University; Museo Nacional del Prado, 2011, p. 104).