Drunken Bacchus with Faun and Satyr

In 1879 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had been in its first building, on Copley Square, for three years, and it paid 500 dollars for this small picture on copper, buying it from the estate of a collector named Thomas Hardcastle. The painting had reached America by an unlikely route. John O'Sullivan, the New York editor who in 1845 coined the phrase manifest destiny for the country's drive west, was the United States minister to Portugal from 1854 to 1858. In Lisbon he bought the picture out of a private collection, and around 1860 he sold it to the Hardcastles. For a long time it passed as a Rubens. The museum now catalogues it as the work of a follower, a painter whose name is lost and who worked in Rubens's manner on this scene of a drunken Bacchus held up by a faun and a satyr. Copper was a support Antwerp painters liked for small, finely finished pictures, and the museum gives this one no date.