Theseus findet das Schwert seines Vaters

The story is a recognition test. Before Theseus was born, his father Aegeus, king of Athens, hid a sword and a pair of sandals under a great rock, telling the boy's mother that when their son could roll the stone away and claim them he was ready to come to Athens and be known as heir. Poussin painted that exact moment around 1638, the young man straining under the weight of the rock while his mother Aethra points to what lies beneath. He did not paint all of it himself. The architecture in the picture is by a colleague in Rome, Jean Lemaire, while Poussin took the figures and the landscape. The canvas later entered the collection of a French duke and hangs today in his chateau at Chantilly, north of Paris.