This painting is a seventeenth-century copy after Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's Rest on the Flight into Egypt, now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

The picture was formerly in the collection of Sir Thomas Baring (1772-1848). Following his death, his collection of Italian, Spanish and French paintings was acquired by his second son, Thomas Baring (1799-1873), who had started collecting in the mid-1830s, and subsequently passed by descent to Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook (1826-1904). The inventory number '234', attached to the frame, corresponds to the entry for the painting in the 1889 catalogue of the Northbrook collection, which records that the picture had formerly belonged to Lucien Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon and Prince of Canino and Musignano (1775-1840), who may have acquired it in Seville.

At least two other versions of the composition were recorded in English collections during the nineteenth century: one belonging to Sir Philip Miles (1774-1845), exhibited at the British Institution in 1821, and another acquired by Archibald McLellan (1795/97-1854), which entered the Glasgow Museums in 1856. G.F. Waagen, who recorded all three versions in his Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854), identified the Glasgow picture as the painting formerly owned by Lucien Bonaparte. More recent scholarship has generally accepted this, but no dimensions are listed in the 1812 Bonaparte catalogue and no buyer is recorded in the 1816 sale catalogue, making it difficult to determine definitively.