The Archdukes hunting in Mariemont

By 1636 this canvas was hanging in the Alcázar in Madrid, and it had been sent there on purpose. Brussels kept shipping paintings to Philip the Fourth to show him how splendidly his relatives were running the Spanish Netherlands, and this was one of them. Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabel, the governors, are resting in the shade of a big poplar in the middle of a hunt, courtiers and huntsmen around them. Behind rises their palace at Mariemont, near Brussels, one of their favourite houses, and the landscape is done almost as a survey: this field, that road, the horizon pushed high in the old Flemish way. The message underneath is precise. Hunting was a right reserved to the nobility, and the country they are hunting over looks rich. Brueghel painted it around 1611 on canvas, 135 centimetres by 246, far larger than the small copper plates he is usually asked about.