In a snow-covered landscape soldiers in armour, some on horseback, disperse to massacre children. In the left foreground villagers plead with a mounted soldier and on the right a soldier with a knife runs after a woman with her child. The Biblical story of The Massacre of the Innocents is described in Matthew (II, 16). Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, so as to avoid the loss of his throne to the newborn King of the Jews whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi. This painting is one of more than twenty surviving versions of the same composition, three of which are signed ‘P. BREVGHEL’. It is a copy after the much-repeated composition by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which emulated the celebrated 'Massacre of the Innocents' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (RCIN 405787).