Born at Siegen in 1577, Rubens received his artistic education at Antwerp from Tobias Verhaecht, a landscape painter, Adam van Noort, and O. van Veen. At the age of twenty-three he went to Italy and entered the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, studying in their own country the works of the great Italian masters, and especially the Venetians, from whose glorious colour he derived more benefit than from his early training. With the exception of a journey to the Court of Philip III. at Madrid, where he was sent on a mission by the Duke of Mantua in 1603, Rubens spent the eight years from 1600 to 1608 in the various Italian centres, and especially in Rome, where he painted, about 1606, the little _Landscape with Ruins_ (No. 2119), which is of interest not only as showing to what degree he was at that time influenced by the Roman school, and by the Carracci, but also as being the very first landscape known to have been produced by him. The same view of the Palatine Hill is to be recognised in the background of the _Four Philosophers_ at the Pitti Palace, and in the portrait of Woverius in the Arenberg collection. Of about the same time, though the figures would appear to have been added at a considerably later date, is the _Landscape with a Rainbow_ (No. 2118). RUBENS AT ANTWERP Having returned to Antwerp in 1608, and married his first wife, Isabella Brant, in the following year, Rubens, who was now made Court painter to Archduke Albrecht, entered upon a period of stupendous artistic activity, which extended to about 1621, when he began to divide his time between art and diplomatic missions, and, having previously organised a vast studio with an army of assistants, often left the execution of his brilliant sketch designs to less capable hands. This early Antwerp period is not particularly well represented at the Louvre, although the collection includes _The Virgin surrounded by the Holy Innocents_ (No. 2078)— a Virgin of characteristic Flemish coarseness and fulness of form, in the midst of a dense swarm of delicious, plump, dimpled, wingless angel-children, whose rosy baby-flesh is painted with inimitable mastery. The picture was painted about 1615, six years before _The Virgin and Child within a Garland of Flowers_ (No. 2079), executed in 1621 for Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. The tasteless floral wreath in this picture, as in the similar versions at Munich and New York, is from the brush of Jan Brueghel. To about the year 1615 belongs also the _Christ on the Cross, with the Virgin, the Magdalen and St. John_ (No. 2082), which can, however, hardly be entirely from the master’s own hand. The mass of unbroken vermilion in the robe of St. John is one of Rubens’s favourite devices at that period. _The Resurrection of Lazarus_ (No. 2081) is the original sketch for the Berlin picture.