Thanks to the intervention of the InBev-Baillet Latour Fund, Hendrick Goltzius’s painting Apamè usurpe la couronne du roi (Apamè Usurping the King’s Crown) or Les quatre pouvoirs (The Four Powers). The painting will be given pride of place in the new Biolley Museum in Verviers.

Hendrik Goltzius (Mülbracht 1558 - Haarlem 1617) received part of his training in Antwerp and Italy, but it was mostly in Haarlem, where he went to live in 1577. He rapidly became a brilliant artist and was internationally renowned at the dawn of the Golden Age of Dutch painting. From 1590-91, he travelled in Italy, passing through Munich. In 1600, aged 42, having perfected the art of using the burin, he turned definitively to painting history. Goltzius is probably the greatest Dutch mannerist painter at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. He was influenced by Rubens, whom he met after his move to Haarlem in 1612.

The Four Powers is inspired by the third Book of Esdras (in the Old Testament). A short interlude recounts the story of three of King Darius’s guards who take part in a debating contest, each making an oratory to the person or thing he believes to be most powerful in the world: wine, the king, woman and truth. The 4 answers to the enigma are represented in a single scene.

The work is monogrammed and dated 1614. As the only work in a Belgian public collection (out of around sixty listed around the world) that is signed and dated by Goltzius, it has to be classified as a Treasure of the French Community.

The restoration work was carried out between January and September 2014. The first objective for the treatment was to stabilise the support so as to prevent loss of the pictorial matter. At a second stage, it was important to treat the varnish, which darkened the composition and flattened the image. Removal of the varnish also enabled most of the over-painting to be eliminated.