Public Domain
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Jordaens painted this canvas in 1615/16, the year he became a master in the Antwerp guild of painters after his training under Adam van Noort, and the museum’s German title means “the abduction of Europa”. The subject is drawn from the second book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the museum calls the picture an early masterpiece by the painter it places third among Antwerp’s history painters, after Rubens and van Dyck, noting that the young Jordaens worked in Rubens’s immediate orbit and that his Europa answers Rubens’s own treatment of about 1611/13 at Windsor Castle. Catalogued in Berlin as inventory 81.2, the painting was bought in 1981 from a private collection in Rotterdam. It is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.