Odysseus on the island of the Phaecians

Homer gives this moment only a few lines. A shipwrecked Odysseus, naked and half-drowned, stumbles out of the bushes and startles a young princess, Nausicaa, who has come with her maids to wash clothes by the shore. Rubens painted the scene around 1630, in his fifties, when he was increasingly drawn to landscape for its own sake. The human story sits small at the lower edge. What fills the canvas is weather and land, the cliffs and wind-bent trees of the storm Odysseus has just survived, under a wide sky opening over the bay. The figures are almost incidental to the country around them. In the distance Rubens set the harbour and towers of the Phaeacians, the safety Odysseus is about to reach.