Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes

For the first time in over two hundred years, Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) two great masterpieces of landscape painting, The Rainbow Landscape (The Wallace Collection) and A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (The National Gallery) will be reunited as part of an exhibition at the Wallace Collection. Although kept together in Rubens’s own collection, the paintings were brought to London in 1803, and separated for good with The Rainbow Landscape eventually entering the Wallace Collection and A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, the National Gallery collection.

Painted as a companion pair, these sweeping panoramic works show Rubens’s newly acquired manor house and estate, Het Steen, at Elewijt (between Brussels and Antwerp) as it was in about 1636. They both celebrate the fertile countryside of Brabant, and pay homage to the great Flemish tradition of landscape painting. The exhibition will explore these paintings as the culmination of Rubens’s practice as a landscape painter, offering new insights into how they were developed as compositions through new technical imaging and photography, together with a newly commissioned documentary exploring Rubens’s work.