The judgement of Solomon: Solomon gives verdict; he commands a soldier to divide the living child in two; the true mother objects to Solomon's verdict (1 Kings 3:25-27)

A soldier has the baby by one leg with his sword up, because the king has just ordered the living child cut in two and half given to each of the women claiming him. Solomon's justice was a favourite subject in the 17th century, a picture of wisdom on the bench. Whose painting this is has moved about. When it first appears in the record, in 1746, it hung at the palace of La Granja among Queen Isabel de Farnesio's pictures and was called a Rubens. The museum's inventory of 1857 gave it instead to Jacob Jordaens, the younger Antwerp painter. The Prado today assigns the execution to an unidentified hand in Rubens's workshop, while noting that the reading of the emotions, above all in the true mother, and the knowledge of ancient sculpture are the master's own concerns. The figures are life-size, and nothing places the canvas anywhere before that 1746 inventory.