After four months of mourning

After four months of mourning he was ready to return to Flanders; his sojourn of eight years in Italy had so far influenced him that he might have remained there indefinitely had it not been for the Archduke and the Infanta pressing him to remain at Brussels and attach himself to their Court. Another circumstance may possibly have weighed with him; for within a year we find him married to Elizabeth Brant, the daughter of a magistrate of Antwerp, and it was not at Brussels, but at Antwerp, that he took up his quarters. Here he proceeded to build a wonderful house—said to have cost him 60,000 florins—after designs of his own in the Italian style, which he filled with the treasures he had collected in Italy. oil painting for sale

Rubens's first pictures were nearly all of them religious subjects. Before he went to Italy he had painted an Adoration of the Kings, aHoly Trinity, and the Dead Christ in the Arms of God the Father, which was engraved by Bolswert. When Vincenzio sent him to Rome to copy pictures there for him, he found time to execute a commission which he received from the Archduke Albert to paint three pictures for the Church of Santa Croce di Gerusalamme, namely, the Crowning with Thorns, theCrucifixion, and the Finding of the Cross. A year later—after returning from a journey to Madrid—he painted the altar-piece for the Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, in which the influence of Paul Veronese is conspicuous. At Genoa, he painted the Circumcision and S. Ignatius for the church of the Jesuits. painting for sale

One of the first pictures which he painted on his return to Antwerp was an altar-piece for the private
 chapel of the Archduke Albert, of the Holy Family. This picture was so much admired that the members of the fraternity of S. Ildefonso, at the head of which was the Archduke Albert, commissioned him to paint an altar-piece for the Chapel of the Order of S. James near Brussels. This picture, which is now at Vienna, represents the Virgin enthroned, surrounded by four female saints, putting the Cloak of the Order on the shoulders of S. Ildefonso. On the wings are the portraits of the Archduke and Isabella, with their patron saints. art oil paintings for sale