Saint Jerome

The gallery in Dresden owns two large paintings of Saint Jerome alone in the wilderness. One is by Peter Paul Rubens. The other was made a few years later by van Dyck, who was about 20 and working in Rubens's Antwerp studio, and the museum reads the younger man's picture as an answer to his teacher's.

Jerome kneels with the lion stretched out beside him, books lying open on the stones and a small crucifix propped up among them. A heavy black curtain hangs across the landscape behind him, the way a curtain hangs over a stage.

Rubens gave his hermit a settled, classical calm. Van Dyck laid the saint's body in fast, restless strokes, so the same act of penance reads as agitation. The canvas is more than two metres wide, and Dresden dates it to about 1618 to 1620, when van Dyck had been a free master in the Antwerp painters' guild for only a year or two.