Mercury and a Sleeping Herdsman

For a long stretch of its history this panel told a different story. Someone painted over it to turn it into Mercury and Argus, the myth in which the messenger god lulls a hundred-eyed herdsman to sleep before killing him, and added a cow seen from behind and a dog asleep at the lower left. A photograph in the Witt Library in London shows it in that state in 1924. By 1942, the year the museum bought it, it had been cleaned.

What came out from underneath was a page of studies. In the early 1630s Rubens was designing the canvases for the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, the royal palace in London, and here he tried out two figures for it on a single panel. The robed man at the lower right is the yeoman who appears in the Union of the Kingdoms, and the Mercury belongs to the Peaceful Reign of James I, a separate scene on the same ceiling.