Massacre of the Innocents

Description

Flesh tones in raw pink and ivory collide with deep crimson blood and the cold grey-blue of armour across this panel, colour doing the work of violence before any single figure resolves into focus. This Massacre of the Innocents reproduction carries that same collision of warm bodies against hard metal, the palette built from Rubens to read as struggle even at a distance, the eye pulled first to a torn red cloth before it finds a face.

About Massacre of the Innocents Reproduction

Painted in Antwerp in the years immediately after Rubens returned from Italy, the panel sets out the moment from the Gospel of Matthew in which soldiers under orders from Herod move through Bethlehem killing every young male child. The foreground is given over to executioners whose bodies twist mid-strike, muscles pulled tight under skin rendered in warm ochre and rose, while mothers claw and push against them, faces caught in open-mouthed anguish. Rubens builds the whole scene on diagonals, a leg here, a raised sword there, a length of drapery cutting across the panel, so that the violence feels continuous rather than frozen at one instant.

Light falls hard and selectively, carving pale limbs out of a shadowed middle ground in a manner that owes as much to Caravaggio as to anything Rubens had painted before leaving Italy. The contrast is not decorative; it isolates specific horrors, a raised blade, a mother clutching an infant, and leaves the rest to dissolve into brown shadow. For years the panel was attributed to a follower, and it was only recognised as the work of Rubens himself shortly before its sale at Sotheby auction house in 2002, after which it entered the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario through the gift of Kenneth Thomson.

The hand-painted reproduction

Each ByMuseum version of this painting is hand-painted by a professional artist in oil on canvas, not printed, matching the ochre, crimson and grey-blue of the original panel stroke by stroke and keeping the visible ridges of paint that give the fighting figures their weight. As a museum quality reproduction it is built up layer by layer, the way Rubens worked, so the raised texture of drapery and muscle sits on the surface rather than flattening into a smooth image.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a print
• Available in multiple sizes
• Gallery-ready presentation
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country

It suits a collector drawn to early Baroque drama, or a room built around strong colour and serious subject matter rather than decoration for its own sake.