Diana and her Nymphs Spied upon by Satyrs

In 1616 Antwerp was halfway through the Twelve Years' Truce, a pause in the long war between Spain and the Dutch Republic, and the city's painters often shared a single canvas between specialists. This is one of those shared canvases. Rubens painted the figures first and left an empty patch, a reserve, for Frans Snyders, an Antwerp specialist in animals and still life. Snyders filled it with the haul of the hunt: a dead boar, a deer, hares and birds. Then Rubens went back over the whole picture to finish it. Diana and her nymphs have slept through the heat of the day, and two satyrs pull back the cloth to stare at them. The Royal Collection points out that Diana, pale and curved, seems meant to echo a silver crescent moon, which may be why she wears no crescent on her head. If the painting has been identified correctly, it was mentioned in 1616 as newly painted, and a year later it may already have belonged to Anne of Denmark, the wife of King James I.