Two men carry off two nude women at the center of a crowded struggle. A man in armor and a red cloak lifts one woman, who twists away with her arms thrown up, while a muscular man at the right holds the other from behind as she reaches toward the ground, her golden hair streaming. A gold cloth slips to the ground below them.

Two horses rear behind the group, one brown and one gray, and a small winged boy holds the brown one, against a sky of heaped clouds. The Bavarian State Painting Collections say the men are Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda and Zeus, abducting Hilaeira and Phoebe, the daughters of King Leucippus of Argos, shortly before their wedding. Peter Paul Rubens painted it around 1618, with Jan Wildens. The museum says its many-sided composition and sensual rendering of textures show Rubens demonstrating the superiority of painting over sculpture. The twins had different fathers, the museum notes: Castor was the mortal son of King Tyndareus of Sparta and Pollux the son of Jupiter, and when Pollux asked not to be separated from his brother, both were turned into heavenly bodies.

The painting came to Munich in 1806 from the Düsseldorf gallery. It is in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.