One of two paintings in the Royal Collection (see also CWLF 65, 403500) which result from a collaboration between Rubens, who did the figures, and Frans Snyders, who did the foodstuffs. In this case Rubens painted his figures first, leaving a space or ‘reserve’ for Snyders to fill; Rubens also provided the finishing touches to the whole.

Diana and her nymphs have set off hunting at dawn; by the heat of the day they have amassed a pile of booty; they take their siesta under a temporary shelter from the sun and sleep till evening, when they are discovered by two voyeuristic satyrs. A scene of this kind is intended to convey a general erotic Arcadian idyll, but also in Rubens’s case to suggest piquant contrasts. Diana and her nymphs are young, chaste, graceful, beautiful and light-skinned; the odd thing is that they hunt, which traditionally takes you into the wildest parts of Nature; here they meet old, ugly, dark, shaggy and lustful beings like the satyrs and the dead boar. It is probably not an accident that Diana is silver-coloured and crescent-shaped like a moon; this may explain why she lacks her usual attribute of a mini crescent-shaped tiara. The position of the left hand tree-trunk is an obvious joke.

If correctly identified this painting was first mentioned in 1616, when it must have been newly painted. Rubens style at this stage in his career is at its most ambitiously heroic, wishing to compete with the masters of the Italian Renaissance: the arrangement and narrative recalls Titian’s ‘Pardo Venus’ (Louvre); the near nymph is a tribute to Michelangelo’s four reclining statues in the Medici Chapel in Florence, suggesting polished marble and emulating Michelangelo’s power-bulges and knotted limbs.