The Judgment of Solomon
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
Poussin painted a balance, not a trial. Solomon's arms open into a triangle, his brow the apex, and the symmetry recalls the pans of a scale, justice's emblem: the women are what is weighed.
Colour rules before the king speaks. On the left, luminous yellow for the mother who lifts a hand to halt the sword and yields the child rather than see it halved; on the right, for the woman pointing, the dark green Poussin keeps for his negative figures.
Weighed twice: 800 livres in the banker Jean Pointel's estate, 5,000 when Louis XIV bought it in 1685.
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.
I Kings 3:27 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 6,000 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.