The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saints

An inventory of the Alcázar in Madrid, taken between 1701 and 1703, found this panel hanging in a ground-floor room that the king's chamber painters used as their workshop. It shows the rest on the flight into Egypt, Joseph asleep in the landscape beside a grazing donkey, the Virgin sitting on a boulder with her son. To the left Rubens added saints who belong to other centuries, George with his dragon and Catherine, and the Prado identifies Catherine's face as that of Hélène Fourment, the painter's second wife, in a pose close to the one he gave her in The Garden of Love. He painted it on oak between 1632 and 1635. On the right a group of angels is playing with a lamb, which stands for the sacrifice ahead, and one of them is hushing the others because the child is there.