Le Fils prodigue

Rubens painted this around 1618, at the height of his Antwerp success, and he seems to have made it for himself. It hung in his own house and was still there when he died in 1640. The title points to the parable, but the prodigal is easy to miss, tucked into the lower right corner where he begs a servant girl for the pigs' food. The rest is a working Flemish barn at dusk, its horses and cattle picked out by candlelight, the far end open onto fields. For all its scripture, the picture is one of his earliest real landscapes.