Meleager and Atalanta

The hunt is over and the quarrel has started. Meleager killed the Calydonian boar and handed its head to Atalanta, the huntress who had drawn first blood, and his uncles are taking the trophy back off her. Jordaens picked that instant. Meleager holds her hand and looks up at the men, the boar's head is hoisted behind them, the hounds are still worked up, a rider pushes in from the left with a spear. In Ovid the scene ends with Meleager killing both uncles, which is what kills him in turn.

The museum's own record gives the canvas two dates, 1620 to 1623 and 1640 to 1650, and the picture reads as work from more than one campaign, the group at the right the earlier part. Elisabeth Farnese had it by 1746, in her bedchamber at the palace of La Granja.

A small oil study for the composition sat in the store of Swansea Museum in Wales for roughly 150 years, catalogued as a later copy, until it was identified as Jordaens's own in 2016.