NB the opening of this exhibition is postponed. Ticket and booking information will be released in late spring. See the museum website for the latest information.
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.
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Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), The Rainbow Landscape, 1636
The Wallace Collection, London
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Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, ca. 1636
National Gallery, London
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 visitor to this exhibition will have a unique opportunity to experience these great paintings together and on their own, and to be immersed in their wealth of detail and ambitious scale.
The exhibition is organized in partnership with VisitFlanders and will be accompanied by a documentary film, and by a richly illustrated, detailed monograph dedicated to the two paintings, available now.
Related CODART publications
Dr. Lucy Davis, “Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes”, CODARTfeatures, July 2021.