Paisaje con vacas y cazadores de aves

After a lifetime of vast commissions and diplomatic errands across Europe, Rubens bought himself a country house south of Antwerp in 1635, and in his final years he painted the land around it for no patron but himself. This is one of those late landscapes. Cows graze along a river in the long light of evening, women milk them and fill copper jugs to carry to market, and the whole scene breathes an easy country calm. Then, from the far bank, a wildfowler fires his gun into the ducks, and the shot cracks the quiet. Rubens took a group of cows and seated women from an earlier picture of his, then kept enlarging this one as he worked, widening and heightening it until what may have started as a copy had become a landscape all its own.