Landscape with a Bird Catcher

The Louvre's title calls this an evening landscape with a full moon, yet many who have written about it see a rising sun, and the pale disc low in the sky can be read either way. Rubens painted it late, around 1635 to 1640, after he had bought a country estate at Elewijt, near Mechelen, and the windmill may be the Elewijt mill, which stood until 1914. The bird catcher of the title is in the foreground, and the other figures follow the old calendar pictures, hunting for autumn, sawing wood for spring. The picture later belonged to the Dutch stadholder William V in The Hague, where the English painter Joshua Reynolds admired it in 1781. In 1795, when French armies overran the Dutch Republic and the stadholder fled to England, it was taken to Paris, and it stayed in France after 1815.