The Holy Family under the Apple Tree

This was once the outside of an altarpiece. Around 1630 to 1632 Rubens painted the Ildefonso triptych for the church of St James on the Coudenberg in Brussels, and these two tall oak panels, each more than three and a half metres high, were the backs of its folding wings. With the wings closed, this is what anyone in the chapel saw. Open them, and the inside showed a miracle, the Virgin appearing to a kneeling bishop-saint. Shut, it was a family afternoon. Mary and Joseph sit with the Christ Child under an apple tree, and the boy John the Baptist has come to visit with his elderly parents, Elizabeth and Zacharias. Rubens kept the holiness low-key here, closer to a Flemish garden than to a vision. At some point the two wings were separated from the altarpiece and joined into a single picture. They came to Vienna in 1777, bought from the abbey on the Coudenberg together with the rest of the triptych.