Mary Magdalene in the Garden, a scene from The Passion of Christ

The painted panels in the Wolsey Closet at Hampton Court are surviving fragments from more than one set of early 16th-century paintings telling the story of The Passion of Christ. The account of Christ's last days before his crucifixion was well known to all Christians and visual representations of this story could be seen in churches and important buildings across Europe. Artists followed accepted ways of portraying the events, often repeating the same elements of the story in order to meet the demands of religious and secular patrons who wanted to display visual proof of their own piety and faith.

Conservation of the panels in the 1960s revealed earlier artworks of similar themes, dating from the late 15th or early 16th-centuries, underneath the visible paintings, showing that the panels have been re-used. This image of Mary Magdalene in the Garden, the only scene on the window wall of the Wolsey Closet, is one such earlier artwork. It is a fragment of a scene that would have shown Christ's miraculous appearance to Mary after his death, outside his tomb.

The panels have been in the Wolsey Closet at Hampton Court since at least the early 1700s, but could have been assembled from more than one other location and cut down to fit their new home. The artist, of both the earlier and later paintings, may have come from continental Europe, attracted to the courts of Henry VII or Henry VIII when the Tudor monarchs were seeking to establish and celebrate their supremacy through the expression of artistic and cultural magnificence.