The panel is divided into four narrative scenes in two registers by red columns with yellow capitals and blue bases. In the center a cartouche cites the Gospel: Luke 15. Descriptive text panels are above each scene. At the top, on the left, the prodigal son takes leave of his father and on the right, he squanders his inheritance on prostitutes. Below on the left, he tends swine. The lost panel on the right would have shown the prodigal’s return to his father who welcomes him with joy. Below the scenes, in the center of the dedication panel, an olive wreath encloses a coat of arms held by an angel.

There are three small stopgaps; to the far left and in the center of the upper inscription, and the head of the prodigal leaving his father in the segment below. There are cracks as well as mending leads; the last panel showing the prodigal’s return has been lost, as is the upper part of the lower inscription on the right. A considerable loss of surface paint diminishes the legibility of the image.

Hans Jegli, the beginning of whose signature can be seen next to the date in the panel, was an important stained glass maker from Winterthur (Boesch, 1955, pp. 30, 47, 50; Schneider, 1970, pp. 291–92, 394, 487, nos. 513 and 514, figs. 513 and 514). The Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum possesses a drawing signed by Jegli, dated 1608, with a different version of a four-part design on the theme of the Prodigal Son. Jegli’s design, however, appears in a panel dated 1606, two years earlier (Divinity School, Harvard University, exhibited in the Rabinowitz Reading Room). The Harvard panel can be attributed stylistic to the workshop of Joseph Murer. It thus seems likely that Jegli copied the Murer precedent for his 1608 drawing. A print source has not been identified. The Los Angeles compositions for the three episodes of Leaving Home, Feasting with Prostitutes, and Feeding Pigs, are different; the fourth, Returning Home, is missing.

A panel produced for Hans Kaspar Huber and Hans Jakob Keller, dating to about 1610–1620, ascribed to Jegli, shows many stylistic similarities to the Los Angeles work (Museum Murten, no. 7015; Bergmann, 2014, pp. 797–98, no. 283; FR_283). In both panels, the architectural framework employs thin red columns topped by gold capitals. Although the lower inscription and shields in the Huber and Keller panel are replaced, they are presumably based on earlier models and show the same surrounding wreath connected by gold fasteners at the top and the bottom. The bright and contrasting color system, as described above, is identical. As an artist of the early seventeenth century, Jegli worked with the three-dimensionality and landscape subject matter popular with his audience. The figures are animated and engaged in easily-read encounters. A viewer can relate to the gesture of the father reaching out to the mounted Prodigal to clasp his hand one last time or the sense of conviviality in the scene of the Prodigal with a woman surrounded by musicians seated under a heavily-laden grape arbor.

Cited in:
LACMA Quarterly, 1945, pp. 5–10.
Normile, 1946, pp. 43–44.
Hayward, 1989, pp. 78–79.
Raguin, 2024, vol 1, pp. 42, 235–37.