Rubens ‘At Home’: The Het Steen Landscapes Reunited

A distinguished painter, diplomat and international traveller, Rubens (1577 – 1640) spend much of his final decade enjoying the fruits of this remarkable career, happy in a second marriage blessed with love and children. Not only did he have a magnificent townhouse in Antwerp, he also purchased a country manor at Het Steen where he could indulge one of his private passions, landscape painting. The just opened exhibition at the Wallace Collection, ‘Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes’ has reunited for the first time since 1803 his two finest landscapes, painted as pendants. Tom Duncan will introduce these masterpieces against the background of the fecund tradition of landscape art associated with the Low Countries stretching back to Peter Brueghel the Elder, Rubens’s own development of this genre and the profound effect his landscapes had on later artists such as Gainsborough and Constable.