Mercury and Herse

Ovid tells this story in the second book of the Metamorphoses. Mercury, flying high over Athens, sees girls coming back from a festival of Minerva with baskets decked with flowers, and the most beautiful of them, Herse, a daughter of King Cecrops, stops him in the air. The poet compares him to a kite wheeling over a sacrifice. Here the god is still up among the clouds with his staff, while Herse, in blue, walks by the river with her eyes lowered and flowers gathered in her skirt. The Mauritshuis dates the panel to around 1625. Under 27 centimetres wide, it is signed CP at the bottom. The stadholders William IV and William V owned it. In 1795 the French confiscated it for the Louvre, and it returned to The Hague after Napoleon's defeat in 1815.