The Fall of Phaethon

In the top right corner of this canvas, in black, someone wrote VAN AEYCK, f. The museum's own record says the hand may not be the painter's. The art historian Svetlana Alpers, who wrote the one full study of this commission, argued that the name is not set down the way the man would have set it down himself, and that this inscription and two others in the same series were probably added in Madrid after the crates arrived from Antwerp. A letter of April 1637 fits that. The Cardinal-Infante Fernando, Philip IV's brother and governor of Flanders, writes to the king that he is returning the original memorandum that came with the names of the painters who made the pictures from Rubens's designs.

So the names travelled on paper, separately from the paint. This canvas is given to Jan Carel van Eyck, whom the Prado dates 1610 to 1685 and who is regularly confused with another van Eyck working in Antwerp at the same time. He was enlarging one of Rubens's small sketches for a royal hunting lodge outside Madrid. Phaethon had talked his father into letting him drive the sun for a day, and Jupiter's bolt catches him as the chariot and horses come down. On the right the composition stops short of what Rubens had drawn. That sketch is now in Brussels.