In March 2024, the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland acquired a seventeenth-century drawing as a gift from a private donor. The work has now been attributed to the Flemish engraver and draftsman Willem Panneels (ca. 1600–34). Panneels completed it after a painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), for whom he worked as an assistant.

The drawing depicts a dramatic moment from the mythological story of Perseus and Andromeda. Here, Perseus rescues her from the sea monster, Cetus (shown slain in the foreground), after having also defeated Medusa previously (indicated by her famous head with writhing snake-hair on his shield). Panneels made the drawing after Rubens’ painting Perseus Releases Andromeda (1622), now in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Thanks to the assistance of art historians Brecht Vanoppen, Nils Büttner, and Kristen Lohse Belkin (affiliated with the Corpus Rubenianum, Antwerp, Belgium), this work − previously unknown to scholars − has now been attributed to Panneels. While the drawing is not signed by the artist, Vanoppen was able to confirm that the pen lines of the figures’ faces and feet are in the style of those found in known drawings by Panneels. However, the brushed areas of brown and tan ink wash (a pigment similar to watercolor) used to add color to the work may have been added later by another artist.

During his research, Daniel Fulco, the museum’s curator, also discovered a collector’s mark in the lower left corner of the drawing. The mark, “TL”, indicates that the drawing was originally part of the now dispersed collection of English portraitist Thomas Lawrence, a major collector of Old Master drawings.