Hera, sich während des Kampfes zwischen Göttern und Giganten verbergend

This canvas comes from the early 1640s, when Carel Fabritius was in or just out of Rembrandt's Amsterdam studio, the most gifted of the master's pupils. What exactly it shows has never been settled. In the 19th century the seated figure by the water was read as Narcissus. The present title arrived only in 2004, when the museum noticed the peacocks, birds sacred to the goddess Hera, and proposed she is hiding by the sea during the war of the gods and giants. A near-identical version in Amsterdam is given to a different painter, so even the authorship is argued over. Fabritius had little time to clear such questions up. He was killed in 1654, at 32, when a gunpowder store blew up and destroyed a quarter of the city of Delft.