Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes exhibition

Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes

3 June 2021 – 15 August 2021
#ReunitingRubens

"An immensely rich show... a marvellous display" — The Spectator
★★★★ — Evening Standard

Taken in 2019. Countryside landscape of haymakers, milkmaids and cattle under a rainbow — Peter Paul Rubens, The Rainbow Landscape, c.1636. © The Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London

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) were 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.

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 had 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 was accompanied by a documentary film, and by a richly illustrated, detailed monograph dedicated to the two paintings, which is available from the Wallace Collection shop.

You can now explore the exhibition online through our 3D virtual exhibition space, with the opportunity to get close to the paintings, listen to audio, and watch the documentary film.