Mercury, Argus and Io

This etching after Rubens’s "Mercury, Argus and Io" (1635–38) is one of eight prints Waltner made as illustrations for the exhibition catalogue of Belgian collector John W. Wilson (1815–1883), who exhibited his collection of old master and contemporary British and French paintings in Brussels in 1873. The catalogue describes, in addition to the version illustrated, three known iterations of this subject by Rubens, which he adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Io, whom Jupiter has turned into a cow to avoid the jealousy of Juno, stands at right. Argus, assigned to guard her, has fallen asleep against a tree at center to the music of Mercury’s pipe. Mercury, sent by Jupiter to kill Argus out of guilt over Io’s misery, plays his pipe with one hand while drawing his sword with the other. Waltner, a celebrated reproductive printmaker and winner of Prix de Rome for engraving in 1868, would have produced this signed proof for collectors in Paris eager to acquire early impressions of contemporary etchings.