St Jerome in penitence

When Rubens died in Antwerp in 1640, the pictures in his house were listed for sale in a printed inventory, and this small Jerome is number 231 on it. The Spanish crown bought it out of that sale. By 1667 it hung in the monastery of El Escorial, and in the 18th century it belonged to Isabel Farnese, the queen of Philip V, at her palace of La Granja. Van Dyck was about twenty when he painted it, around 1618 to 1620. The saint is shown almost full length at the mouth of a cave, with a wooden cross, a skull and a stone in his right hand, the stone he beats his own chest with. The canvas afterwards travelled under other names, catalogued at different times as Mateo Cerezo, as Jan Brueghel and as Rubens himself. In 1906 the Berlin museum director Wilhelm von Bode proposed that it was a first idea for the much larger Jerome in Dresden.