In this picture, the setting epitomises the classical concept of a Locus amoenus ("pleasant place)" which developed from the time of Homer and referred to an ideal place for sensual being, with flowing water that impregnates the land and shade provided by trees. Socrates describes such a place in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Rubens’s Locus amoenus is recreated with such conviction that it makes me think of a salient quality of his art: It is life enhancing, it brings us close to something akin to a Nietzschean "life forcé". Places of this type described in ancient texts and myths had a touch of otherworldliness and sexual tension, implicit in Plato’s passage in his mention of the nymphs. There are ten of these divinities in this painting. They take on the form of young and beautiful women. They were often referred to as lovely and described as partially naked, and were the object of desire of gods and men alike. Nymphs could live in rivers (if so, they were referred to as naiads), mountains, forests, or meadows, usually near springs and sacred caves. They embody the fertility of the world. This is made explicit in this painting in the pair that holds the Horn of Plenty, a symbol of abundance. Ovid explains in his Fasti and in Metamorphoses that nymphs found the horn and packed it with blossoms and fruits. In the latter book he explains: "The naiads filled up that horn with fruits and fragrant flowers; they made of it a sacred thing. And now Abundance – gracious goddess – uses this, the Cornucopia, as her motif". Rubens devoted several paintings to the subject (one of the most beautiful belongs to the Prado, Three Nymphs with the Horn of Plenty). Satyrs share the scene with the nymphs and offer them apples and grapes instead of pursuing them as they usually did. Their gazes and attitudes are sexualised. They lure the nymphs with the said fruits, but the young women seem confident (one, more threatened than others, holds back the arm of the satyr). This is different from some other paintings by Rubens where he shows them fighting back against the satyrs.

The large, unstable figure is Silenus, the fat and drunken follower of Dionysius, who had earlier been his educator. Like the nymphs, he is described in some texts as a cave dweller – here he stands unsteady next to the opening of a cave – and he often embodies abandon understood in a positive manner, as a wise response to life’s hardships. Below him, a tigress and her cubs are offered grapes by a baby satyr. Tigers are often present in paintings by Rubens showing satyrs, Silenus, and the nymphs (an example is the spectacular Drunken Silenus in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek). They were associated with Dionysus in many texts: Horace, in his Odes, writes that tigers carry the car of their god.

Rubens was thoroughly trained in classical culture, and like the intellectual elite of his time, learned to express his own feelings by quoting ancient authors. An example of this is a letter that he wrote to a friend following the death of his first wife. To convey his need to remove himself from his daily surroundings because of the sadness they produced, he quoted a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that describes Dido’s state after the departure of Aeneas: "Alone she mourns in the empty hall, and falls on the couch he has left". Similarly, we can see this painting as the expression of an idea learned from classical literature and integrated into Rubens’s understanding of life and the world to such an extent that it becomes personal.

If you look closely at the painting, you can see the traces of an earlier underlying composition (this is especially visible in the hand that has been overpainted next to the knee of one of the nymphs at left who looks at us). The first version was made by Rubens about 1615, and then thoroughly overpainted and also enlarged over twenty years later (there are copies of the underlying image that show what it used to look like, as does an X-ray that was taken at the Prado). Making changes to earlier works and enlarging them was not exceptional for Rubens; it is a sign of his impressive creative energy. When he repainted this scene, he increased the importance of the surrounding landscape, bringing it closer to the poetic vision that we find in many of Titian’s mythologies (the Worship of Venus and the Bacchanal of the Andrians).

The figure of Silenus and the area surrounding him are built with very dense and opaque paint, applied in a way reminiscent of how Vasari described the late style of Titian: "with bold strokes and dashed off with a broad and even coarse sweep of the brush" (Vergara, Alejandro, in Mythological Passions, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2021, pp. 114-116).