Paysage avec arc-en-ciel

For most of his career Rubens painted for kings and churches, huge commissions crowded with gods and martyrs, and he doubled as a traveling diplomat brokering peace between crowns. Later in life he turned, largely for his own pleasure, to the flat farmland of Brabant around Antwerp. This is one of those landscapes: milkmaids, grazing cattle and a loaded hay wagon under a wide Flemish sky, with a rainbow arching over the whole scene. Rubens rarely parted with these pictures. This one left his circle only after his death, and by 1769 it had reached the Russian imperial collection, bought from a Saxon minister's estate in Dresden. The rainbow, an old sign of calm after the storm, carried a particular weight for a man who had spent years trying to end wars.