The Prodigal Son Turned Away by a Rich Man

The German title the museum still uses is blunt: the prodigal son, with Poverty on his back, is turned away from a rich man's door. That is meant almost literally. Following a habit older than the picture itself, the painter has given the young man's ruin a body, a figure of Poverty clinging to him as he begs, so the thing wearing him down is something you can point at. By now, in the parable from Luke, his money is long gone and no one who once knew him will help. Jan de Beer set the encounter in the fanciful, overloaded architecture that Antwerp painters loved around 1520. The rich man turns him away in the doorway while the beggar carries his poverty on his shoulders.