Lot and his Daughters

Rubens painted this around 1614, back in Antwerp and at the height of his powers, running the busiest workshop in northern Europe. The subject comes from Genesis. Lot has fled the destruction of Sodom, and his two daughters, sure that no other men are left alive, get their father drunk so they can bear his children. Rubens tells the story through skin, setting the daughters' youth against the older man's body, with wine and heavy drapery spilling around them. For most of its life the picture was barely seen. It hung for more than a century at Blenheim Palace, the seat of the dukes of Marlborough in England, then passed into a private collection. Only in 2016, after it sold at auction in London for about 58 million dollars, did it go on public display for the first time, arriving at the Met on long-term loan. It now hangs near the museum's own Venus and Adonis by Rubens, a canvas that once shared those same walls at Blenheim.