BRITAIN: One of the world's three most expensive paintings will go on display in a public gallery this week for the first time in its eventful 400-year history.
The Massacre of the Innocents by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens will hang at London's National Gallery from Thursday.
The picture belongs to David Thomson, billionaire chairman of the Thomson newspaper empire, who bought it at Sotheby's auction house last year for £49.5 million (€75.15 million) - a world record in sterling terms.
He has loaned it to the gallery for three years, after which it will be housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada.
The only two paintings which have fetched more in dollar terms were Vincent Van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Gachet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Au Moulin de la Galette, which sold in 1990 for $82.5 million and $78.1 million respectively. Until last year, the Massacre had spent most of its life in the darkened rooms of private collections.
Rubens painted it, probably in 1610, shortly after his return from eight significantly formative years travelling and painting in Italy.
It is mentioned in correspondence in December 1698 between two brothers of the Forchoudt family - at the time Antwerp's leading art dealers - and was sold shortly afterward to Furst Johann Andreas von Liechtenstein.
It appears in several inventories up to 1873 but its attribution mysteriously changed in 1780 to Rubens' follower Jan van den Hoecke, who died in 1651.
Still attributed to van den Hoecke, the painting was sold by the Liechtenstein family in 1920 to a dealer who sold it to the father of a now 90-year-old woman who lives in Vienna and owned the painting until last year's auction.
The National Gallery said in a statement that the Massacre, a gory depiction of one of the most brutal episodes from the Bible, will be placed next to Rubens' Samson and Delilah - the first time the paintings have been seen together for over 100 years.