Paisagem com arco-íris

In 1635 Rubens, Europe's busiest painter and a working diplomat who had carried messages between courts for years, bought a country estate called Het Steen south of Antwerp. He was in his late 50s, married to his young second wife Helene Fourment, and he wanted to slow down and paint for himself. This is one result. It is his own landscape, made for pleasure rather than a commission, with hay going up in stacks, cattle driven along, ducks by the river, and a rainbow opening over the wet fields after a shower. He painted it as one of a pair. Its companion, a morning view of Het Steen itself, hangs in London, the two halves of one countryside that were kept apart for more than two hundred years.