The Lion and the Mouse

Rubens ran the busiest studio in Antwerp, and for a scene like this he rarely painted every part himself. The animals here were almost certainly the work of Frans Snyders, a friend who specialised in creatures and hunts, while Rubens handled the design and the larger figures. The subject is one of Aesop's oldest fables. A lion once spared a mouse, and when the lion is later caught in a hunter's net, the small animal repays the debt by gnawing him free. Several versions of the composition survive, passed between collections over the centuries. One hung for years at Chequers, the English prime minister's country house, where a story clung to it that Churchill had once touched up the mouse himself.