The museum keeps the title in two languages — Susanna och gubbarna in Swedish and Susanna and the Elders in English — and its own account gives the story: Susanna, bathing in her garden in Babylon, is surprised by two elders who press their advances on her, and when she refuses them they turn and accuse her of adultery instead, until the prophet Daniel proves her innocence. The museum reads the motif as one of the painter’s favourite subjects, and notes that it gave him leave to model the naked woman’s skin in thin, translucent layers of pink and grey.
The panel is signed and dated 1614 and measures 66 × 51 cm; the museum measures the frame it keeps it in at 88 × 73 × 9 cm.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was born in Siegen and grew up in Antwerp, where he was apprenticed to Otto van Veen and admitted to the Guild of St Luke in 1598. He spent the years 1600–1608 in Italy, at the courts of Mantua and Genoa and in Rome, where the antique and above all Titian reshaped his painting, and on his return he was appointed court painter to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella in Brussels. From his Antwerp studio the largest commissions of the age passed, and he served the Spanish crown as a diplomat as well as a painter, knighted by both Spain and England. He died in Antwerp in 1640. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.