Landschaft mit Tobias und dem Engel

In the 1630s Philip IV of Spain was building a new pleasure palace on the edge of Madrid, the Buen Retiro, and he wanted its walls covered with landscapes. His agents in Rome commissioned a whole series from the painters working there, and Claude, a Frenchman who had settled in Rome and become the great master of golden light, supplied several, including this one. The story is from the Book of Tobit. The boy Tobias, guided by the archangel Raphael, guts a huge fish whose organs will cure his blind father. But those figures are tiny. Claude has pushed them into a lower corner so the real subject can be the wide river, the trees, and the hazy light spreading toward the horizon, the thing his collectors actually wanted from him.