Landscape with Saint Paul the Hermit

For two hundred years the kneeling figure in this landscape was called Saint Jerome. The Prado says he is Paul the Hermit. He carries none of Jerome's usual attributes, and the 1701 inventory of the Madrid palace the picture was painted for names Paul, the Egyptian who went into the desert during the persecution under the emperor Decius in the 3rd century and stayed there until he died. Saint Anthony buried him, helped, the story goes, by two lions. The painting had an authorship problem to match. Royal inventories and the early Prado catalogues gave it to Gaspard Dughet, Poussin's brother-in-law, and only in 1859 did a French writer argue for Poussin himself. X-rays taken at the museum turned up one more change. The tall tree rising behind the saint was not in the first version of the picture. Poussin added it in 1637 or 1638, after the canvas was otherwise finished.