The painter, son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and an influential master of Flemish painting, depicts the hermit saint surrounded by a frenetic swarm of horrifying yet bewitching infernal beings. The subject of temptation was still in vogue in the early seventeenth century, given that pessimism, an obsession with sin and fear of the devil were equally rampant in Protestant and Catholic countries. The painting is innovative in terms of the importance given to the natural landscape and aerial perspectives of the background enlivened by depictions of villages, lakes and churches beneath a splendid hazy blue Nordic sky.

The work was commissioned for the Casa de la Aprobación in Valladolid, the first women’s prison in Spain, founded by Magdalena de San Jerónimo, a lady at the court of Philip III, who was convinced that “most of the damage to Spanish customs was born out of the freedom, dissolution, and faults of many women”.