Flora and Zephyr

Two painters made this panel in Antwerp around 1618. Rubens did the figures, Flora on her stone bench with a pair of putti holding out her cloth and Zephyrus overhead tipping a basket of flowers into it. Everything that grows in the picture is by Jan Brueghel the Elder, a flower specialist who worked alongside Rubens for years, and so are the paired animals scattered through the garden, peacocks, ostriches and guinea pigs.

It hangs now in a village outside Dessau, in the gallery hall of Mosigkau, a small rococo palace built in the 1750s for Princess Anna Wilhelmine of Anhalt-Dessau. The Flemish and Dutch pictures there reached her family from the collection of Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, widow of the Dutch stadholder Frederick Henry of Orange, whose daughter Henriette Catharina married into the house of Anhalt-Dessau.

They were hung the old way, frame nearly touching frame in panelled fields of the wall, and several were trimmed or enlarged to fit the field they were given. Nobody has rearranged that room since.