Mercury readying himself to decapitate the sleeping Argus

This depiction of Mercury preparing to behead the sleeping Argos, dating to around 1650, treats a mythological subject from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Jacob Jordaens, the leading Flemish painter after Rubens' death in 1640, brought a robust, earthy vitality to classical mythology that distinguished his approach from Rubens' more idealized treatments. Jordaens's mythological paintings belong to the great tradition of Flemish mythological painting that Rubens had established, in which the gods of antiquity inhabit a world of Flemish physicality and sensuous abundance. Like his master and model Rubens, Jordaens treated classical mythology as a vehicle for celebrating the beauty of the human body and the pleasures of the natural world, but his mythology is heavier and more earthbound than Rubens's, his gods more recognizably Antwerp burghers temporarily promoted to divine status. His command of multi-figure compositions in warm dramatic light made him one of the most sought-after painters of monumental mythological subjects in the Spanish Netherlands.

Jordaens' vigorous brushwork and warm, fleshy palette create a characteristically robust interpretation of the mythological subject, with strong chiaroscuro emphasizing the dramatic tension of the moment before Mercury strikes.