L'Enlèvement des Sabines

This was among the paintings still in Rubens’ workshop when he died in 1640. It was a commission for Philip IV of Spain, part of a steady stream of work the Antwerp master turned out for the Spanish court in his last years, even as gout increasingly crippled his hands. The subject comes from the founding legend of Rome, when the city’s first men, short of wives, seized the young women of the neighbouring Sabines during a festival. Rubens gives it the crowded, twisting energy of bodies in motion that buyers across Europe wanted from him. He left it unfinished, and a fellow Brussels painter, Gaspar de Crayer, completed the canvas after his death.