Possibly by Anthony van Dyck, 'Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs', about 1620

This uproarious crowd of mythical characters is noisy and ill-behaved, but meant to make you smile. An old man with bushy white hair and beard has lost his clothes during the revels. He’s unsteady on his feet but seems blissfully untroubled by his situation. He’s held up by two satyrs, though perhaps not for long. A young bacchant – a follower of Bacchus, the god of wine – squeezes grapes over the old man’s head, his wreath of vine leaves all askew.

Beside him, a bacchant plays the panpipes, his cheeks and nostrils flaring and his thick curls blowing in the wind. On the right, perhaps lit by the flames of a hidden bonfire, a third satyr wiggles his tongue lasciviously at an older bacchant, who, by the look of the heavy stick in her hand, doesn’t welcome his attentions. Looking on at the rumpus are two little putti who bring more grapes to add to the party. One wears a coral necklace, traditionally said to keep away the devil but seemingly having little effect.

The old man is Silenus – in Roman myth, the teacher and mentor of Bacchus. In the seventeenth century, Greek and Roman myths were popular as subjects for painting and drama, both comedic and tragic. Flemish artists in particular found Silenus a personification of everything ribald, exuberant and funny. He made an appealing subject, giving artists the chance to paint an old man, naked and drunk – comic but sometimes touched with pathos.

The picture came from Rubens’s studio in Antwerp, although we are not sure who painted it – it seems to have been a joint effort by several young artists working there. A German visitor to the studio in 1620, shortly after the picture was painted, wrote: ‘We saw a vast room without windows, but lighted by a large opening in the ceiling. There were gathered a good number of young painters who worked on different pieces of which Rubens had given them a chalk drawing touched here and there with colours. The young men had to completely execute these paintings, which were then finished off with line and colour by Rubens himself.’

Rubens had seen and admired Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, in which a slightly younger Silenus slumps on a donkey, almost rolling off into the arms of a satyr. Rubens painted a scene similar to Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs which is now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and afterwards possibly drew a model for his pupils to follow in the way suggested by the German traveller. The sky and landscape may be by Jan Wildens and the grapes by Frans Snijders. But the superb rendering of Silenus’ bloated, happy face and the folds and bulges of his solid, glowing flesh strongly suggest that they were painted by the young Anthony van Dyck.