Rubens’s creative painterly style can be studied in an exemplary fashion in this work. An x-ray reveals that originally only the satyr in the foreground was planned. At a later stage he added two more planks to the panel, one to the left and one at the bottom, and included the second satyr whose head does not appear as brightly because it was painted on a dark background. Rubens was probably inspired by Classical cameos to place the heads unusually close together. In order to characterise these wild natural creatures, his brushwork is free and informal.