NETHERLANDISH Caravaggesqucs had a habit of appro-priating certain subjects where they felt their talents could be most profitably displayed. Jan Janssens staked a claim to the Mocking of Christ, Honthorst to feasting scenes, Gerard Scghers to the Denial of St Peter, though of course there was also a lively interchange. In Seghers's case the religious theme had the advantage of easy adaptability to genre treatment. Seghers hankered after the depiction of ordinary men and women of flesh and blood - he had not spent several years in Manfredian circles in Rome to no avail -but also liked to show them in a moment of crisis in their lives when they had done some awful thing, and fear and qualms of conscience flickered over their faces. This is where the masked candle camc in so handy. So he got the best of both worlds, the physical and the spiritual. It has always been recognized that the night scene of the Denial was his special province. But owing to the fact that a number of pictures by or after him have been wrongly attributed, nobody has realized quite how often he attacked this theme. It is the purpose of this article to explore these pictures, to publish some originals, and to group together others which only survive in copies. Two of his Denials were engraved, so there has seldom been any doubt about them. But even in one of these cases - the Fesch Seghers - the picture was for a long time known as Honthorst. One composition engraved by Andrea de Paullis shows three figures, St Peter on the left with his back turned to the other two, the maid in the centre holding the candle, not as usual pointing St Peter out but seizing him by the shoulder, and on the right the soldier about to arrest him. The original painting has disappeared and no copies are known to survive. But that it was in the same direction as the print is suggested by the fact that in the latter Peter points to his breast with his right hand. A chalk drawing in the Teyler Museum in Haarlem shows the painting in reverse, and was done with the engraving in mind, more likely by the engraver than by Seghers himself. The fact that this drawing and the print are the same size (c.24.5 by 23 cm.) supports this. The other even more famous Denial with eight figures, engraved by Schelte a Bolswert, survives in a large number of painted versions and was his most popular picture in the Caravaggesquc idiom. In this case the S. a Bolswert en-graving is in reverse, showing St Peter turning his left arm to his breast. The original survives in the collection of the Earl of Mansfield at Scone Palace and is here published for the first time (Fig.i 0.2 My bald statement that this is the original, and not the picture generally given this status in Raleigh (good though it is), cannot be proved, and rests on a slight difference in quality. I am glad to say I have one ally in the rejection of the Raleigh picture, H. Gerson,a and am now hoping that I shall gain further support by the introduction into art literature of this rival candidate, though I must admit that the surface dirt makes judgment difficult from a mere photograph. If I am right, then the distinguished history of the picture must be transferred from Raleigh to Scone. It was painted for a chimney-piece in the house of the Antwerp sculptor Andre Colyns de Nole (1598-1638);4 subsequently belonging to Deync, Ghent (1753); J.-B. P. Lebrun, Paris (1791), and probably also Cardinal Fe.sch, Paris and Rome (c.1810-184415).6 One point that speaks in favour of the Mansfield picture is that the dimensions given for the Lebrun Denial fits this, and not the Raleigh version.