Laughing Democritus

An old inscription on the back of this canvas once claimed it was painted by Rubens in 1630. It was not, though the mistake is easy to understand. Antoine Coypel painted it in 1692, when he was just past 30, at a time when the Paris Academy had spent years arguing over whether colour, the great strength of Rubens, counted for as much as drawing. Coypel sided with colour, and it shows in the loose, warm handling of the fur cap, the white beard and the wine-red cloak. The sitter is Democritus, the Greek philosopher said to have laughed at human folly, who was usually paired in art with Heraclitus, the one who wept at it. Coypel never painted the weeping partner. He did make an etching of this head, probably in the same year, with four lines of verse beneath it. They say that this cheerful critic of human stupidity, whom nothing ever embittered, would have laughed a great deal harder had he lived in the present century.