Atalanta and Meleager Hunting the Calydonian Boar

By the mid-1630s Rubens was in his late fifties, wealthy, troubled by gout, and increasingly drawn to landscape. He had bought a country estate south of Antwerp, the Chateau de Steen, and painted the fields and light around it. This picture folds an old myth into that same wide, panoramic land. The story is from Ovid. The goddess Diana sends a monstrous boar to ravage Calydon, and a band of heroes hunts it down, the huntress Atalanta drawing first blood before Meleager delivers the kill. Rubens spreads the chase across the foreground and lets the country open out behind it, the light entering low from the left. It is one of the few landscapes he chose to paint on canvas rather than wood.