Le Retour des paysans des champs

Seen from a height, a wide Flemish countryside glows in golden light while small figures head home from work and a cart halts for a flock of sheep. In this Rubens, the landscape itself is the hero.

The story behind the painting

The date of this painting has moved around. Estimates range from 1620 to 1635, the year a copy of it was signed and dated by its maker. The most convincing hypotheses place it in the early 1630s: some say 1632 to 1634, perhaps in collaboration with Lucas van Uden, others put it in Rubens's last phase, around 1640, which is the date Wikipedia and Wikidata use. For the cart Rubens used two preparatory drawings, one at Chatsworth House with a reaper and one in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin showing two carts.

What to look for

The view looks out from a high point over countryside dotted with trees, the horizon falling roughly at the middle of the picture. Small figures, in the manner of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's genre scenes, tell us the time of day: peasants returning from the fields, and a wagon with a man on horseback that seems to stop for a flock of sheep on the road. Between the two women carrying hay and the rams, look for a pentimento, a visible trace of the artist changing his mind. In the sky, streaks of bare canvas echo the diagonal lines in the lower half.

Meaning and intent

The real subject is the landscape; the rural scene is little more than a pretext. The land is probably around Mechelen, shown as a serene vision of nature bathed in golden light. The people are kept small so that the wide view, the trees and the light can dominate. It is a picture about the end of a working day in a peaceful countryside, and about the pleasure of looking far across it. Wikidata gives the panel's size as 121 by 194 cm.

Legacy

For a long time the painting was paired with Odysseus on the Island of the Phaeacians as a companion piece. Both were in the collection of the Duke of Richelieu in 1677 and, after a period in the Habsburg collection, came to Florence in 1765 on the initiative of the Lorraine family. French commissioners took both panels to Paris in March and April 1799, and they stayed in France until the end of 1815; even the restitution reports by Canova and Karcher describe them together. The painting is now in the Galleria Palatina in Florence.