Nessus and Dejanira

For most of its life this canvas passed as a Rubens. The Paris dealer Jean-Baptiste Lebrun sold it under that name to Count Alexander Stroganov in the 1770s, and it can be picked out on the wall in a drawing of the Stroganov family made in their Paris apartment at about the same time. The critic Alexandre Benois was the first to hesitate, finding the colour timid and pale. In 1975 the Hermitage scholar Maria Varshavskaya judged the handling to be that of someone in Rubens's immediate circle, working in the 1630s from a composition Rubens had drawn and the engraver Paulus Pontius had printed. Since 1981 the museum has listed it as school of Rubens. What it shows is the death of the centaur Nessus. He carried Dejanira across a river, tried to make off with her, and took a poisoned arrow from Heracles. Dying, he told her to keep his blood as a charm to hold her husband's love. Years later it killed Heracles.