A Bathing Nymph Taken by Surprise by a Satyr

When the Rijksmuseum bought this panel at a Brussels sale in 1888, it was catalogued as the work of a painter called Michel van Woreven. No such artist is known. The name was a misreading of the small signature at lower right, Mo. v. W f, which belongs to Moyses van Wtenbrouck, a painter working in The Hague in the 1630s.

The subject has been renamed too. Older catalogues called it Pan and Syrinx, after Ovid's story of the nymph who escapes the god Pan by turning into reeds. Here, though, nobody is running. The nymph lies at the edge of a woodland pool while a satyr, half man and half goat, comes upon her, and the museum now describes the scene in just those terms. Gnarled trunks and a warm, muted light close in around the pair, the kind of Arcadian setting Wtenbrouck painted again and again in these years.