La reconciliación de Jacob y Esaú

The two brothers meet again after years of fear and a stolen blessing: Esau, who had been cheated of his inheritance, coming down with four hundred men, and Jacob bowing before him with his wives, children, and herds, braced for a fight that turns instead into an embrace. Jan van den Hoecke painted the scene in the manner he knew best, having worked as an assistant in the busy Antwerp studio of Peter Paul Rubens. The warm, muscular crowd and the animals pressed into the edges come straight out of that Rubens world. The panel is held today by the Bavarian state collections, in the gallery at Schleissheim palace near Munich, where a great deal of Flemish painting from those decades ended up.