Gossart's style, which blends Italian form with Flemish characteristics, also shows the influence of Dürer, whose engravings carried the classical canons of art across all of northern Europe. This painting is the earliest example in Gossart's oeuvre of the theme of Adam and Eve, a subject that preoccupied him over the course of his thirty-year career. It is closely based on Dürer's 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve, which presents the culmination of Dürer's nearly four-year study of these two figures. Gossart exchanged Dürer's dense forest backdrop and animal inhabitants for a clearing at the edge of the woods, with a small pond behind the figures and an open view to a meadow and hills beyoynd at the left. This landscape construction is generally characteristic of the works Gerard David painted in Brugesin the same period.