奥地利大公阿尔布雷希特七世的肖像

Antwerp spent much of 1635 building triumphal arches. A new Habsburg governor, the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, was to make his ceremonial entry into the city, Rubens designed the whole apparatus, and the actual painting was handed out to some twenty colleagues. Cornelis de Vos was given a run of portraits of the governors who had come before, which Rubens then went over himself. Albert had been dead for 14 years by then. He and his wife Isabella had ruled from Brussels, and they signed the truce of 1609 that gave Antwerp twelve years of something near normal trade before the fighting resumed. The city putting on this pageant was borrowing to pay for it, its river to the sea still closed by the Dutch. Brussels bought the portrait from a dealer in 1838, and the matching picture of Isabella is still beside it.