Christ's Charge to Peter

This was painted for a grave. Nicolaas Damant was chancellor of Brabant, one of the senior lawyers of the Spanish Netherlands, and around 1613 he commissioned an altarpiece for the tomb he was preparing in the collegiate church of Saint Gudula in Brussels. He died in 1616, about the time Rubens finished it. The subject was chosen for the family rather than for the church. Damant's father was also called Peter and lay buried at the same altar, so the panel shows Christ handing the keys of heaven to Peter and telling him to feed his sheep. It stood over that tomb for nearly two centuries. In 1800 the chapter sold it, and after passing through a dealer and then the future king of the Netherlands it reached London, where the 4th Marquess of Hertford bought it in 1850.