Die heilige Cäcilie

Rubens painted this panel in 1639/40, in the last year of his life — he died in Antwerp on 30 May 1640 — and it is catalogued in Berlin as inventory 781. He had been court painter to the archdukes Albert and Isabella in Antwerp from 1609, and had spent much of the 1620s on the diplomatic journeys that took him to Madrid, Paris and London; the pictures of his final decade, made as he left the running of the workshop to his assistants and painted more with his own hand, are freer and warmer in manner than the great altarpieces of his middle years. The saint the picture is named for is Cecilia, the patron of music. The painting reached the museum in 1829/30, transferred from the Royal Prussian Palaces while the Gemäldegalerie was being formed on Berlin’s Museumsinsel; the painter and art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen was its first director from 1830. Rubens’s work is held today by the Prado, the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Alte Pinakothek among many others, though Antwerp, where he built his house on the Wapper and where his studio trained a generation of painters, keeps the largest group of them. The painting is held in the Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.