Landschaft mit Eberjagd

By 1616 the long fight between the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic had paused. A truce signed in 1609 gave Antwerp a rare stretch of calm, and Rubens, back from eight years in Italy, was running the busiest studio in Europe out of the city. Wealthy patrons wanted hunts, and he gave them this one: horsemen and hounds closing on a cornered boar under a sky already turning. The landscape does most of the work, the wind bending the trees so the coming storm matches the violence at the centre. Rubens kept this subject going for years and sold versions to courts across the continent. This panel later passed through the collection of the Duke of Buckingham in England before it reached Dresden.