Rarely Seen Rubens Painting Returns To Auction—And It Could Fetch $35 Million

“Salome Presented With the Severed Head of Saint John the Baptist” is believed to have been painted around 1609 after Rubens returned to his native Flanders from Italy, where he lived for nearly a decade.

The painting depicts the biblical scene when John the Baptist’s severed head was presented to Salome, King Herod’s daughter-in-law, who requested that he be killed.

The painting’s subject was a common theme in 17th-century paintings, according to Sotheby’s, when the popularity of art depicting “dangerous and powerful women” as a cautionary tale led artists to depict other biblical figures in a similar light, like Rubens’ painting “Samson And Delilah,” which hangs in the National Gallery in London.

Little is known about the origins of “Salome Presented With the Severed Head of Saint John the Baptist,” but according to Sotheby’s, the painting was documented in Spanish royal inventories from 1666 until 1700, which indicates it may have been commissioned by a Spanish aristocrat traveling through Antwerp, where Rubens settled.

The painting was believed to have been lost until it was rediscovered in a French family’s collection, where it had for decades been misattributed to a follower of Rubens instead of the artist himself, George Wachter, chairman of Sotheby’s North America told Forbes.

It sold for $5.5 million in 1998 sale at Sotheby’s to art dealer Otto Naumann and late Canadian businessman Alfred Bader, who had art conservationist George Bisacca from the Metropolitan Museum of Art restore the painting, Wachter said, at which point it was sold to hotel billionaire Steve Wynn in a private sale (Wynn lost control of the painting when he sold the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas to MGM Grand, according to Wachter).