A closer look : Ruben’s Peace and War

Super study morning at the National Gallery focusing on Ruben’s “Peace and War” from the collection led by Rebecca Lyons.

We began by looking at where Ruben’s was in his career at this point and how he came to be in England on a diplomatic mission which led to the painting of this work as part of a plea to Charles I to end his war with Spain in the Netherlands.
 
We then sat in front of the picture and dissected its iconography and tried to imagine looking at it with a contemporary eye of the time. We now just see the children in the foreground as part of the mix of people but at the time it would have been very obvious that these were contemporary children incongruously appearing in a mythological scene.
 
Finally we discussed the context of the picture, who the children were, whether it has expanded in size and why and what happened to the picture when it was sold from the Royal Collection on Charles execution. All in all a fascinating morning and a chance to get to know a picture better and to understand more about it.

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