Landscape with Philemon and Baucis, from Large Landscapes

Toward the end of his life, Peter Paul Rubens realized a series of six large landscape prints, all but one engraved by Schelte Adamsz. Bolswert. The genre of landscape painting had become especially important to Rubens in his final decade, when he purchased a country estate and retired from city and court life. Though artists more typically represent Philemon and Baucis, the modest and elderly couple from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, when they receive Jupiter and Mercury as dinner guests, here we see the destructive forces of nature at Jupiter’s command with the gods and their humble hosts ascending to a mountain top at the viewer’s left.