Joos van Craesbeeck was a Flemish genre painter active in the mid 17th century. Though his paintings
bear the unmistakable infl uence of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Adrian Brouwer, and David Teniers the
Younger, his oeuvre is nonetheless idiosyncratic and of interest to researchers. This article presents a detailed examination of one of his most enigmatic paintings, The Temptation of St. Anthony (currently held
at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe).