The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Saint Anthony, the Egyptian hermit of the fourth century, went into the desert to pray, and his biographer, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, told how the devil came to him there in every shape, as wild beasts and as a woman. Flemish painters turned the story into a crowded spectacle, and Teniers painted it many times. Here, on a copper plate almost 80 centimetres wide, the old saint kneels in a grotto with his skull and crucifix while a courtesan and a troop of demons close in. The museum dates it to about 1650.

Its later owners read like a short history of 19th-century fortunes. In 1868 it was sold in Paris from the collection of Anatole Demidoff, heir to a Russian ironworks dynasty, who took the title Prince of San Donato from his villa outside Florence. By 1893 it belonged to Charles Tyson Yerkes, the Chicago streetcar magnate who paid for the great telescope of the Yerkes Observatory, and it was sold with his estate in New York in 1910. The collectors Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo bought it in 1996 and gave it to the museum in 2019.