Ninfas e sátiros

By the mid-1630s Rubens had mostly stepped back from the grand commissions and diplomatic errands that had filled his earlier life. Newly remarried and settled at a country house south of Antwerp, he painted a set of large mythologies for no patron at all, for his own walls. This is one of them: nymphs handing round apples and grapes, a heavy cornucopia between them, and the swaying, drunken bulk of Silenus, the wine god's old companion, off to one side. The satyrs here are offering fruit rather than chasing the women, which is not quite how these creatures usually behave. Rubens kept the picture in his studio until he died in 1640. Philip IV of Spain, who had known him for years, bought it out of the estate for the royal palace in Madrid.