Paesaggio con portatori di pietre

Rubens painted this landscape around 1620, not for a patron but for himself, the way he made most of his countrysides. A wagon piled with rough stone is being hauled up a broken track past a great cliff that splits the picture in two. Look from side to side and the light makes no sense as a single moment: on the right the land opens under an evening sky, while on the left a river gleams under a full moon. Rubens seems to have wanted both day and night together in one view. The canvas hung for years at Houghton Hall in England, until 1779, when Catherine the Great of Russia bought the whole Walpole collection and shipped it to the Hermitage, where it still hangs.