The Rest of Diana

In Antwerp in Jordaens's day a large hunting picture was often a joint job. A figure painter did the people, and a specialist such as Frans Snyders, the city's leading painter of animals and still life, supplied the dead game. For a long time the game in this canvas was given to Snyders, or to Adriaen van Utrecht, another Antwerp still-life painter. The Louvre now thinks Jordaens may have painted it himself.

Diana, goddess of the hunt, sits among her nymphs and a few satyrs under a dark canopy, with the day's catch hung up and laid out in front of them. The canvas dates from the 1640s and is more than two and a half metres wide. A smaller version belongs to the Petit Palais in Paris. The Société des Amis du Louvre, the museum's private friends' society, bought this one at Sotheby's in London and gave it to the Louvre in 1982.