Landscape with Cattle

Rubens made his name with history painting, the biblical, mythological and allegorical scenes that ranked above every other kind of picture until well into the 19th century. Landscapes were a sideline, and when he did paint one, around 1618 in the case of this panel, he looked back to an older Flemish tradition. Cows grazing in wooded country is a theme that goes back to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Flemish master of the 1560s, and Rubens knew that work at first hand. He collected Bruegel. One of the pictures he owned, a Landscape with the Flight into Egypt painted in 1563, is listed in the inventory of his estate after his death in 1640, and it hangs today in the Courtauld Gallery in London. The museum also reads a political note into this herd at peace among the trees, the calm that had settled over Flanders after the truce agreed with the northern Netherlands in 1609.