In April 1908, the London art dealers Durlacher Brothers offered a painting as a gift to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. The object in question was a small, unsigned panel depicting Susanna and the Elders (fig. 9.1 and pl. 9.1) painted ‘by a student of Rembrandt, perhaps by G. Flinck’. That it was not considered an exceptional product of the Rembrandt workshop was already indicated by the addendum specifying that the donation remain ‘under the value limit of 5000.– Marks’. Nevertheless, Wilhelm Bode accepted the picture for the museum. This perhaps occurred with the rationale that the new acquisition would complement Rembrandt's Susanna and the Elders acquired in 1884 (fig. 9.12 below), which could now be placed beside a student work of a similar subject. The series was completed with Susanna and the Elders by Pieter Lastman (1614), which likewise reached the Gemaldegalerie in 1908. The museum thus possessed three depictions of Susanna by Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, all of whom stood in a master-pupil relationship to each other.

The central motif of the composition is the nude Susanna, who is seated upon a stone covered by a white cloth and turns her brightly lit back to the viewer. Her natural surroundings consist of the bank of a body of water encircled by vegetation.