Garland with the Virgin and Child

In April 1621 the truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic ran out after 12 years, and that July the Archduke Albert died in Brussels, leaving his widow, the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, governing the Spanish Netherlands on her own. This small panel was painted in Antwerp about then. Jan Brueghel the Elder laid the flowers, fruit and small creatures round the edge, and van Balen painted the Virgin and Child in the middle, following a model by Rubens. Pictures of this shape answered a need. Protestant reformers rejected images of Mary and the saints, and Catholic buyers in Flanders wanted her on the wall, framed in the richest thing a painter could make. The Prado believes Isabel Clara Eugenia sent the panel to Madrid in the 1620s, though it can only be followed with certainty from the late 18th century, hanging in the Royal Palace.