Circle of Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Miss F.S. MacKreth, Yorkshire, by 1866;

Private collection, London, by 1968 and until at least 1969;

Art market, London, 1980;

Private collector;

By whose estate sold ("Property from a European Estate"), London, Sotheby's, 14 December 2000, lot 261 (as Follower of Rubens);

With Galerie Bailly, Geneva, by 2003;

Anonymous sale, Genoa, Cambi, 12 December 2024, lot 68 (as Follower of Rubens);

Where acquired by the present owner.

York, Yorkshire Fine Art & Industrial Exhibition, June 1866, no. 430 (lent by Miss F.S. MacKeith);

Cologne, Kunsthalle, Weltkunst aus Privatbesitz, 18 May - 4 August 1968, no. F.35 (lent from a private collection, London).

Yorkshire Fine Art & Industrial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, York 1866, p. 147, cat. no. 430 (as Rubens, The Family of Darius);

Weltkunst aus Privatbesitz, exhibition catalogue, Cologne 1968, n.p., cat. no. F 35 (as Alexander and the Family of Darius);

J. Müller Hofstede, "Neue Olskizzen von Rubens," in Städel-Jahrbuch 2 (1969), pp. 209-210, cat. no. 7, reproduced fig. 19 (as Rubens, Alexander and the Family of Darius);

J. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, A Critical Catalogue, Princeton 1980, vol. I, pp. 631-632, cat. no. A15; vol. II, reproduced pl. 479 (under "Questionable and Rejected Attributions," A Subject from Ancient History (?));

E. McGrath, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIII(1): Subjects From History, London 1997, vol. I, p. 93; vol. II, reproduced fig. 67 (as "? After Rubens").

This work is almost certainly a replica of an oil sketch executed by Sir Peter Paul Rubens in preparation for a lost large-scale composition. The subject of the scene remains enigmatic, contributing to the work’s long-standing interpretative complexity. At left, a young military leader sits in an elaborate chair, his introspective pose recalling Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, in the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo, Florence. He appears to receive counsel from a helmeted figure at his side. Opposite, a woman kneels with two children in an attitude of supplication, while two men, one bare-headed and one bearded seem to plead her case. In the background stand two additional bearded figures, who heighten the scene’s sense of moral gravity and deliberation.

During the nineteenth century, when the painting was shown in the Yorkshire Fine Art & Industrial Exhibition, it was identified as depicting Alexander the Great receiving the family of the defeated Persian king Darius III, an episode recounted by Plutarch and Valerius Maximus. According to this tradition, Darius’s mother, accompanied by her daughter-in-law Stateira and her two granddaughters, mistakenly addresses Alexander’s companion Hephaestion as the conqueror, prompting Alexander to urge clemency. This reading was endorsed by Julius Müller Hofstede, who published the work in 1969 as an autograph oil sketch by Rubens.

Julius Held subsequently questioned this identification and noted further incongruities with other potential subjects. The kneeling woman, for example, appears too young to represent Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, who according to Plutarch implored her son to abandon his siege of Rome. Elizabeth McGrath later observed that the helmeted figure beside the seated leader appears to be a woman—more plausibly Minerva or Prudence than a fellow warrior—thereby suggesting that rather than a historical episode, the sketch may depict a mythological or allegorical subject.