Hercules as Heroic Virtue Overcoming Discord

Around the large central oval of the Banqueting House ceiling in Whitehall, Rubens set four smaller ovals in the corners, each showing a virtue getting the better of a vice. In this one Hercules, standing for heroic virtue, overcomes Discord. The museum suggests the choice may also have spoken to the political ambitions of King Charles I, who ordered the ceiling.

Rubens planned the scheme in a long run of small oil sketches on panel. Boston dates this one about 1632 or 1633 and catalogues it as a work of his workshop, the assistants who painted alongside him in Antwerp. Its later travels are partly on record. It went through Paris sales in 1904 and 1907, belonged to the Budapest collector Marcell Nemes until his sale in 1919, and in 1947 the London dealers Agnew's sold it to the museum.