Tournoi devant le château de Steen

In 1635 Rubens, who had spent years as both painter and diplomat shuttling between the courts of Europe, bought a country estate called Het Steen, north-east of Brussels. In his last years he mostly painted what he could see from it. This picture takes his own fortified manor, with its moat and drawbridge and squat tower, and sets in front of it something out of an older world, a mounted tournament of knights in armour wheeling across the foreground. The style of that cavalry combat borrows from an earlier Flemish painter, Sebastiaan Vrancx. Rubens died in 1640, a year or so after this, still adding to a run of landscapes he made for no patron but himself.