The Triumph of Henry IV

Peter Paul Rubens

ca. 1630 · Oil on wood · European Paintings

This energetic sketch shows Henry IV, king of France, entering Paris “in the manner of the triumphs of the Romans,” as described in Rubens’s contract of 1622. Rubens was commissioned to paint forty-eight large canvases for the king’s widow, Maria de’ Medici, to decorate the Palais de Luxembourg. Those depicting her life (now at the Musée du Louvre, Paris) were finished in 1624, but little of the companion series devoted to her husband was completed before Maria’s banishment from France in 1631. The present oil sketch is the last of four in which Rubens worked out his heroic allegory of events from recent history.

Artist

Peter Paul Rubens

Date

ca. 1630

Medium

Oil on wood

Department

European Paintings

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1942