(Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
Queen Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus,
oil on canvas, 213 x 166 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Ooms-van Eersel, Antwerp, 15-20 May 1922, lot 135;
sale, estate of Karel Ooms, Antwerp, 29 March 1960, lot 246 (as Studio of Peter Paul Rubens);
Collection Barendse-Arts;
thence by descent to the present owner

Literature:
E. McGrath, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XIII (I). Subjects from History, London 1997, p.33 cat. no. 4, copy (2) ‘showing the composition before additions’ (in contrast to the Louvre picture which was enlarged in the late 17th Century)

The present picture is a studio replica of Rubens’s Tomyris and Cyrus, conserved in the Louvre, Paris, (inv no. 606). Originally in the collection Everhard Jabach, Elizabeth McGrath dates the Louvre work to circa 1625. After it was sold by Jabach in 1671 to Louis XIV, the French king had the Louvre canvas added to, most visibly at the top, to fit the decorative scheme of his Salon d’Apollon constructed at Versailles around 1690. McGrath notes the participation of the workshop in several passages of that picture.

In the present picture the symphonies of colour, so typical of Rubens’s reinterpretation of Venetian painting, are used to lessen the horrific impact of the blood from Cyrus’s severed head dropping onto the rich textures of the Persian carpet beneath. According to Herodotus (484-485 BC), the troops of Tomyris, the Queen of Scythia, killed the Persian King Cyrus the Great in battle. She had his corpse beheaded, and the head put into ‘a wine-vessel filled with blood’. The story of Tomyris fits into the topos of the power of women, or Weibermacht, which had been popular in Flemish painting since the Renaissance. The detail of a dog in the foreground licking the blood from a gilded vessel is a typically Rubenesque touch.