Narcissus

Rubens sketched this scene with Narcissus's face twisted in fury, the moment late in Ovid's third book when the boy understands that the beauty in the water is his own and beyond reach, and tears his robe. Jan Cossiers, enlarging that small panel onto canvas between 1636 and 1638, changed the face. His Narcissus is calm and soft featured, caught a few minutes earlier, at the instant of first looking down. The reflection lies along the bottom edge of the picture. The canvas is nearly square, 97 by 93 centimetres, one of more than sixty mythological scenes sent from Antwerp for Philip IV's hunting lodge outside Madrid, and Rubens's angry version is still in Rotterdam. In the royal palace inventory of 1772 the painting hung in the princess's antechamber.