Aeneas Rescuing Anchises from Burning Troy

Hendrick van Steenwijck, the Younger · c. 1610

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

22.6 × 31.5 cm (8 7/8 × 12 3/8 in.); Framed: 29.6 × 38.5 × 6.1 cm (11 5/8 × 15 1/8 × 2 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Rendered in the flickering glow of a burning city, this small but arresting panel captures one of antiquity's most celebrated acts of devotion — a son carrying his father through the flames of Troy's final night. Hendrick van Steenwijck the Younger was among the most skilled Flemish painters of architectural and nocturnal scenes in the early seventeenth century, a tradition he inherited directly from his father. Where many of his contemporaries relied on daylight to define space, Steenwijck built his compositions around artificial illumination — fire, torchlight, and distant conflagration — using these sources to sculpt form and generate atmosphere with remarkable economy. The result is a work that feels simultaneously intimate and catastrophic, the drama compressed onto a panel barely larger than a book. Steenwijck spent a significant portion of his career in England, where he worked for Charles I and became one of the few Flemish masters to establish a lasting reputation at the Stuart court. The hand-painted oil reproduction replicates the warm amber palette and precise tonal gradations of the original, giving the same sense of firelight pressing against shadow that makes the Art Institute's panel so quietly powerful.