La entrada triunfal de Enrique IV en París

By 1627 Rubens was juggling two giant commissions for Marie de' Medici, the widowed queen of France. One told the story of her own life. This canvas belonged to the second, meant to glorify her late husband, Henry IV. It shows the king riding into Paris in 1594, the year he finally took his capital after converting to Catholicism to end France's long religious wars. But the cycle was never finished. Marie fell out with her son Louis XIII, was pushed from power, and by 1631 was living in exile. Rubens set the unfinished canvases aside, and this one stayed in his studio. The Medici in Florence bought it decades later, which is how a picture of a French king came to hang in the Uffizi.