The Goddess Flora

Flora is the Roman goddess of flowering, and the festival held in her name opened the season each spring. Here she sits crowned with the flowers she governs, lifting a sprig to her face, a red cloak heaped across her knees. The real display in the canvas is botanical. Roses are massed on the branch behind her, a basket spills blooms at the lower right, and past the balustrade there is a terrace of potted plants with a house in the distance. In Antwerp around 1625, when this was painted, flower painting was a specialism with its own buyers and its own prices, and a picture of this kind was usually built by more than one hand, a figure painter and a flower painter sharing the canvas. The Prado's author line for it reads workshop of Rubens. Down at the lower left the number 1670 is painted on, one of the old inventory numbers the canvas still carries.