Landscape with an Avenue of Trees

When the Paris banker Everhard Jabach died in 1695, the inventory of his pictures, drawn up the next year, described this one as not yet finished. Jabach was one of the great collectors of his day, a man from Cologne who had sold a large part of his paintings and drawings to Louis XIV. Its entry pictured a great avenue of trees with a meadow in front, and it recorded that Rubens had painted the scene in oil on paper, the sheet glued onto wood. It is one of his late views of the country around Het Steen, the estate outside Antwerp that he bought in 1635, seen from high up, with the plain running away on a diagonal and a country house far off on the right, perhaps his own. At some point after that inventory, someone else finished the picture, presumably so that it would sell more easily. The cloudy sky, the foliage of the trees on the right and the strip of ground along the bottom were all added then.