A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning

Peter Paul Rubens painted A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning in 1636, two years before his death, depicting the manor house he had bought near Antwerp as a retreat from court life. The landscape opens wide beneath a luminous sky still touched with dawn, with a wagon moving along the road and game birds taking flight. It is among the most personal works of Rubens’s final decade, painted with a freshness that profoundly influenced the landscape painters of the next generation.