Diana and Actaeon

Antwerp around 1600 was a city without a working harbour. After the Spanish retook it in 1585 the Dutch closed the river Scheldt to shipping, and the trade that had made the place rich moved north to Amsterdam. What the city still had was skill, and its painters turned towards small portable luxuries that could be sold abroad. This is one of those, painted on a copper plate about 36 centimetres across, the kind of picture kept in a collector's cabinet. Jan Brueghel painted the landscape. The figures, Diana surprised at her bath and Actaeon in the moment before she turns him into a stag, are usually given to Jacob de Backer, an Antwerp painter so thinly documented that scholars still disagree about the year he died.