The Rainbow Landscape (1640)

This is Rubens painting entirely for himself. No patron commissioned it, no saint or king appears in it, only farmland steaming after a shower, milkmaids and cattle, and a rainbow thrown across the sky. He made it near the end of his life, around 1640, when the busiest painter in Europe had finally stepped back from the courts and diplomatic missions that had filled his years. The subject clearly held him: he returned to a rainbow over this kind of countryside more than once, and this version, the latest of the group, is the one now in Munich.