Enrico IV all'assedio di Amiens

This is a small oil sketch for a painting that was never made. In 1621 Marie de' Medici, widow of Henry IV of France, hired Rubens to fill the Luxembourg Palace in Paris with two grand cycles, one glorifying her own life and a second devoted to her late husband's battles. The first cycle he completed. The second, showing Henry as a warrior king, he had barely begun before Marie lost her long power struggle at court and was driven into exile, and the commission collapsed with her. So all that survives of Henry's cycle are quick, fluid sketches like this one, the king on horseback before the besieged city of Amiens, worked up in thin brown and gold as Rubens thought the scene through.