Diana and her Nymphs surprised by Satyrs

In 1639 Philip the Fourth of Spain placed an enormous order: 18 large paintings at once, to decorate his quarters in Madrid, and he wanted them from the most famous painter in Europe. That painter, Peter Paul Rubens, was by then in his early sixties, wealthy, ennobled, and increasingly crippled by gout in the very hands he painted with. He met demand like this the way a great workshop does, designing the whole and letting his studio and specialists carry it out. For the animals here he worked with Frans Snyders, the leading painter of beasts of the day. The scene is a moment of interruption, Diana the huntress and her nymphs resting in a clearing after the chase, caught off guard as satyrs come pushing in from the woods. Rubens laid it across more than three metres of canvas as a single sweep of turning bodies. He would be dead within the year, and commissions like this Spanish series were among the last work to leave his studio.