Rubens's Landscapes

He looks at Rubens's early landscapes, completed in the years following his return from Italy in 1608, immediately raising one of the principal themes of the book: how these paintings were made. A chapter is devoted to Landscape with Het Steen, in which he describes Rubens's life as a country gentleman - his purchase of the estate of Het Steen and the time he spent there in the 1630s with his second wife and young family - and discusses the composition of Landscape with Het Steen and its pendant the Landscape with a Rainbow (now in the Wallace Collection, London).