Landscape with Philemon and Baucis

The story is from Ovid. The gods Jupiter and Mercury wander the earth in disguise, turned away at every door until one poor old couple, Philemon and Baucis, take them in, and for that the two are spared while a flood drowns the region that refused them. But Rubens seems to have begun with the weather, not the myth. He painted a raw storm first, a black sky bursting open, a stream in flood, an ox trapped in a broken tree, bodies washed to the bank, and only later worked the small rescued couple into the middle distance. Landscapes like this were private work, made for himself rather than a patron, and this one he carried out entirely with his own hand, without the busy workshop that turned out his large commissions.