Park Landscape with Merry Company

Rubens spent the late 1620s as a diplomat, travelling to Madrid and London to broker terms between Spain and England while Antwerp sat inside a war that had been running since the 1560s. Around 1630 he pulled back from that work, married Helena Fourment, and began painting a good deal for himself. Small landscapes on oak panel came out of those years, and this one is under a metre wide, the park of a country house with groups of figures talking and courting among the trees. The type was a real Flemish thing, the pleasure garden of a wealthy household. The light colour and easy mood of it run ahead to the garden conversation pieces French painters would be making 70 years later. The panel has been recorded in the imperial gallery in Vienna since 1781.