Allegory of the return of peace

The return of peace following military conflict was a standard subject for Baroque allegorical painting, particularly in the Low Countries where the century was punctuated by war — the Eighty Years' War, the Thirty Years' War, the Franco-Spanish conflict — and where each settlement was celebrated with visual programmes. Van Thulden's 1657 Allegory of the Return of Peace, held by an Amsterdam art dealer, likely relates to one of the treaties of the mid-1650s. Peace allegories typically depicted Pax as a female figure extinguishing the torch of War, accompanied by Abundance, Justice, and celestial witness. The Baroque formula for such images — established by Rubens's famous Peace and War panels — gave painters a tested vocabulary that clients recognised and valued. Van Thulden, trained in Rubens's workshop, was ideally positioned to produce authoritative variations on this iconographic programme.

The allegorical subject requires coordinating multiple personified figures — Peace, War, Abundance, possibly Time revealing Truth — in a coherent spatial arrangement that makes the political argument legible. Van Thulden draws on the established Rubens formula: warm light surrounding the figures of peace, darker and more turbulent zones associated with departing war. The composition's movement is primarily horizontal, figures turning toward each other in reconciliation.