Milkmaids With Cattle In A Landscape By Peter Paul Rubens At The Queen Gallery In London England Editorial Photo

This magnificent landscape almost certainly came from Rubens’s own collection. It was described in an inventory drawn up between 1634 and 1649 as a view of Laken a village near Brussels . The church in the background with an avenue of trees does resemble the now destroyed church of Our Lady at Laken which in the seventeenth century housed a famous relic - a girdle of the Virgin - and was a popular place of pilgrimage, especially for women wishing to conceive. The Archdukes attended processions to the church every year and Albert commissioned a new window for the church following its restoration in 1601. Rubens seems to have included the church in the same way that Brueghel does in his Village Festival Royal Collection to suggest that all good things take place with the blessing of the Church and perhaps, in view of the identification of the Archdukes with this particular shrine, under their watchful eye.