The story of Saint George slaying the dragon was popularized by the medieval chronicler Jacobus de Voragine in his Legenda aurea. The story recounts how Saint George, a Roman soldier of Christian faith, saved the daughter of a pagan king by subduing a dragon with his lance. The princess then led the dragon to the city, where the saint killed it with his sword. In recognition of the service Saint George paid them, the king and his subjects converted to Christianity.
Despite its evident quality and a monumentality that belies its small scale, this painting has thus far evaded definitive attribution. The painting is first documented in the collection of Thomas Jefferson Bryan, one of the first serious collectors of old master paintings in America. There, it bore an attribution to Albrecht Dürer on account of a spurious Dürer monogram, removed during a cleaning undertaken after the 1980 sale, on the rock immediately to the right of the horse’s rearing front legs. Bryan, who opened the Gallery of Christian Art in New York City in 1852, subsequently donated his collection to the New York Historical Society in 1867.
The painting retained its traditional attribution to Dürer until 1934, when Max Friedländer published it instead as a work by Jan Gossaert in his seminal, multi-volume Die altniederländische Malerei, and dated it to circa 1507(loc. cit.). The attribution was generally upheld in the scholarly literature in succeeding decades, save a publication by Julius Held, who attributed the painting to the Master of the Antwerp Adoration (loc. cit.). In more recent decades, scholars have come to see this compelling image as the work of an anonymous artist active in the first few decades of the sixteenth century in Antwerp. On account of the distinctive rock formations, which rely on the work of Joachim Patinir, the painting almost assuredly dates to after 1515, the year in which Patinir became a master in Antwerp's painters guild.