About this work
The scene locks in at the most perilous instant: one woman clutches the living child upside down, the other collapses over a small corpse, the executioner stands ready, and King Solomon — enthroned in gold and crimson — extends a moderating hand that will unmask true motherhood.
The design hinges on a towering triangular structure, with Solomon at the apex — turned three-quarters toward the central group, his draped arm extending a calm line of authority — and a band of bodies at the base: the pallid dead infant, crouching dogs, and bunched carpets that give the stage its tactile foundation.
The canvas is split into a warm side and a cold one, a polarisation that encompasses both colour grouping and the moral weight of the story itself: the yellow garments of the true mother, Solomon's red cloak, and golden throne set against the executioner's blue sash, the false mother's icy white dress, and the twisted silvery columns behind her.
The canvas bristles with pointing fingers, outswept arms, and twisting torsos, while armour flashes, silk ripples, and bare muscles flex — yet the highest drama lives in faces: pleading, doubting, and judging.
Dated to around 1617, the large oil on canvas — measuring 234 × 303 cm — now hangs in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. This places the work squarely within Rubens's most ferociously productive decade, the same years that produced *The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus* and the great Counter-Reformation altarpieces. Notably, Rubens himself did relatively little of the actual brushwork; the painting is believed to be a product of his lucrative workshop, where a group of highly skilled painters translated the master's own oil studies into large finished canvases.
In this work, the Flemish master condenses moral philosophy, political theatre, and physical splendour into a single, decisive gesture.
Beyond the figures, tall columns open to a slice of blue sky, establishing a public venue worthy of deliberation — architecture that moralises the event, with columns signifying stability and law, the blue horizon suggesting the commonwealth beyond the palace walls.
Rubens's composition is more complex and sophisticated than earlier treatments of the subject, placing the two mothers on either side of a courtier rather than directly before the king, and — crucially — putting the true mother's back to the viewer, so we must place complete reliance on our reading of her body language. This is a painting for a room with scale and presence — a double-height wall, a library, a dark-panelled study where it can command the space the way it once commanded a palace. It speaks to the
