Landscape with a hanged man on a gallows

Rubens bought a country house outside Antwerp, the Steen, in 1635, and the landscapes of his last years were painted for himself rather than for a client. This one is very small, an oak panel about 20 centimetres by 25, and nobody was waiting for it.

A gallows in the 17th century stood on open ground at the edge of a town's jurisdiction, placed where the road would bring travellers past it, and the body was left up. Berlin's catalogue describes what he made of that. A figure in white hangs from the gibbet at dusk, a breaking wheel stands beside it, a thin moon is up, a castle sits far off, and the last light is going along the horizon.

The gallery dates the panel between 1635 and 1638. Rubens was in his late fifties, badly slowed by gout in his hands, and he died in 1640.