The Sacrifice of the Old Covenant

In the lower right corner you can catch Rubens at the start. He first laid out the main shapes of this panel in brown paint, and the contour of a woman's arm from that stage still shows. Then he brought the scene to life in bright colour. It is a study for one of the tapestries on the Eucharist that he designed in the mid-1620s for a convent in Madrid, where the woven set is still kept. The subject is a Jewish sacrifice, a lamb on the altar at the left, which Christian teaching read as foreshadowing Christ's own. The sketch went to England. It belonged to Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, a statesman under Charles II who bought paintings on the Continent for his house at Althorp, and it passed down his family until the 7th Earl Spencer, grandfather of Diana, Princess of Wales, sold it to the London dealers Agnew. A Boston collector, William Coolidge, bought it in 1961 and gave it to the museum in 1985.