What Allen Memorial Art Museum's Creepy Little Creature Shows Us

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Peter Paul Rubens,  The Finding of Erichthonius,
oil on canvas, 1632, Allen Memorial Art Museum

The temptation is always to run straight towards your goal. Sometimes that works, but often it leaves you wide of the mark, especially in art.

This lesson hit me over the head when I was just starting out as a painter when I was a studio art major at Oberlin College. The school's Allen Memorial Art Museum has the most remarkable and troubling painting by the 17th century artist Rubens, The Finding of Erichthonius from 1632. Despite it having been mysteriously cut down in size years later it's still a powerhouse of a painting. 

At Oberlin I saw it almost daily and I was always a little creeped out by it. Its subject involves the finding of the snake-tailed baby by the three daughters of King Cecrops in a tale from Greek mythology. The story ends badly with the startled daughters driven to madness. I would have preferred to avoid such unpleasantness, but the painting had an odd power to pull me back look at it yet another time.

The clashing of opposite qualities can be the engine that drives a painting's energy. Right next to the infant creature one of the unknowing daughters kneels down wearing the most spectacularly painted golden silk dress. Rubens chose a visually spellbinding outfit to lure his viewers in and to heighten the contrast when the baby's tail is revealed. Yet this works of several levels- within the fabric's sheen he created curved patterns of folded cloth that mimic the pose of the baby's tail- they are opposites but this formal link cements what will be a powerful encounter.

The artful way Rubens presents this strange baby is a lesson that has stayed with me as a painter. For example just a year ago I was preparing a large canvas for the Burchfield Penney Art Center's show of the paintings I created over the three years I served as their Artist in Residence. 



Philip Koch, Chestnut Ridge Panoram, oil on canvas, 36 x 48
inches, 2018


It was a winter view of the icy shore of Lake Erie. I liked the composition and had painted it in with all chilly blues and greens. Despite this it still needed a spark to achieve the starkly frigid mood I was after.  A memory of The Finding of Erichthonius came back to me with its delightful playing off of opposites. Within  a few minutes I invented a yellow cloud and placed it in the far sky at the right. That and a few tiny notes of warm yellows and yellow greens in the foreground and I had my painting. 

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