Le Retour des paysans des champs

In his last years Rubens, the most celebrated painter in Europe and a working diplomat, began making landscapes for no patron at all, simply for himself. In 1635 he bought a country estate, Het Steen, outside Antwerp, and the flat Flemish farmland around it fills these late pictures. This one shows farm workers and a wedding party heading home along a track at the end of the day, the whole scene washed in low golden light. There are no gods and no saints, just carts, cattle, a fiddler and the land. Rubens kept works like this in his own house rather than selling them. It reached Florence in 1765 and has hung in the Pitti Palace ever since.