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The Judgment of Solomon
1649 · huile sur toile (oil on canvas) · Musée du Louvre, Paris
Sizes
image 20×13.4 in on a 20×16 in sheet
The museum’s file supports 18×24 in at 250 dpi; a larger sheet would fall below our floor.
What is dpi?
Dots per inch: how many pixels of the museum’s file go into each inch of paper. Our floor is 240 for sheets up to 20 inches, 180 up to 36 inches and 120 beyond, because a larger print is seen from further away. We never offer a sheet below the floor, and the number on each size is the one you receive.
Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 308 gsm cotton rag · pigment inks · printed to order
Printed to order · the whole painting, never cropped · if it arrives damaged, we replace it
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All editionsAbout this painting
A soldier holds a baby up by one leg with his sword raised, and the whole hall waits on the blow. The Louvre reads the moment as frozen an instant before it falls. Solomon sits above on his throne, arms spread, a finger pointing each way; Bernard Collet finds those arms beginning a triangle whose apex is the young king's brow, a scale held level, the emblem of Justice. On the left the true mother flings out a hand to stop the soldier and, in Howard Oakley's account, asks that the child go to the other woman rather than die. On the right the other woman points, a dead infant across her lap. Poussin painted it in 1649 for the banker Jean Pointel; Louis XIV bought it in 1685. The living child is still in the air.
Sources: Bernard Collet, compositional analysis of Poussin's Judgement of Solomon · Musée du Louvre collection record, INV 7277 · Howard Oakley, "The Story in Paintings: The Judgement of Solomon", eclecticlight.co, 28 July 2016 · False mother's accusing pointed finger, demanding the child be divided
The king answered, and said: Give the living child to this woman, and let it not be killed; for she is the mother thereof.
3 Kings 3:27 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner)