Deucalione e Pirra

In the mid-1630s the Spanish king Philip IV was fitting out a hunting lodge outside Madrid, the Torre de la Parada, and he wanted its walls covered with scenes from ancient myth. He turned to Rubens, by then old and running a busy Antwerp workshop, who designed more than 60 of the pictures himself and left the full-size painting to younger hands. This is one of Rubens's own quick oil sketches, worked up in loose, rapid strokes. It shows the story from Ovid in which Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only two people to survive a great flood, are told by an oracle to throw stones behind them, and where each stone lands a new human being rises out of the ground. The large finished canvas, painted from this sketch by Jan Cossiers, has since been lost, so only Rubens's small first thought still survives.