The Sacrifice of Isaac belongs to the artist’s mature phase when the painterly influences of a neo-Titianesque nature became more evident. In stylistic terms, it appears to lie midway between the Descent from the Cross in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam , which comes from Rijsbergen and can be dated to the 1640s, and the St Ambrose in the Museo Nacional del Prado , painted in about 1655 for the monastery of San Francisco in Burgos, which also offers – together with the figure of Joseph of Arimathea in the altarpiece of Amsterdam – a clear typological parallel in support of the reference to De Crayer.

Indeed, the painting under consideration, which has all the trappings of an autograph work, given the large number of pentimenti to have re-emerged and left visible after the last cleaning, was already known through a small sketch in the so-called Ghent Album, inventoried in 1950 and kept at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten .

Indeed, modern studies have confirmed that almost all the folios are linked to compositions by the two artists; seventeen drawings are by De Crayer– preliminary studies, definitive models, memories (probably done for study purposes and as part of a repertoire) – and a second group of seven folios of lower quality, all of them - together with the discovery of the Sacrifice of Isaac – taken from known inventions by De Crayer .