The Triumph of Henry IV

This small panel, not much more than two feet across, is a proposal for something enormous. In 1622 Marie de' Medici, the widowed queen of France, hired Rubens to paint two great cycles for her Luxembourg Palace in Paris, one on her own life and one on the reign of her murdered husband, Henry IV. The cycle about Marie was finished and hangs today in the Louvre. The one about Henry barely began. Here Rubens is working out a single scene of it around 1630, showing Henry entering Paris on a Roman-style triumphal car, painted fast and loose because a sketch like this existed to sell the idea to the patron. In 1631 Marie lost her long struggle for power at court and was driven out of France, and work on the Henry cycle stopped. Rubens did carry this one scene to a finished canvas over 20 feet wide, which survives in Florence. Most of the series it belonged to was never painted.