Vertumnus and Pomona

Look at the left edge. A foot and a spade break off in a way that makes no sense as a design, and Svetlana Alpers, who wrote the one full study of this commission, concluded that the panel was sawn down at that side. The interesting part is when. Jacob Jordaens painted the large canvas that was made from this sketch, and his version, now in the Museu do Caramulo in Portugal, still contains the missing strip, so the wood was cut after he had it in front of him. The story is from the fourteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Vertumnus courted Pomona, goddess of orchards, disguised as an old woman, and then threw off the disguise; Rubens catches the hinge of it, his hand drawing her in, hers holding him off, the pruning hook she works her trees with still in her grip and a vine over her head. The sketch is one of those he painted from 1636 for Philip IV's hunting lodge at El Pardo, and the landscape takes up as much of it as the two figures do.