Archdukes Albrecht and Isabella in the garden of Coudenberg Palace, Brussels

This 1624 panel, now in the Rubenshuis, Antwerp, depicting Archduke Albert and Isabella in the garden of the Coudenberg Palace, is one of Jan Brueghel's most overtly political paintings. Albert and Isabella, the Spanish Habsburg governors of the Southern Netherlands, were among his most important patrons, and their private garden at the Coudenberg — the ducal palace at the top of the hill in Brussels — served as a setting for court leisure and the display of political harmony. Painted three years before Albert's death (1621), this work belongs to a series of paintings celebrating the archduchess and her court that Brueghel produced in the 1610s–20s. The garden setting, with its exotic flowers and horticultural mastery, reflects the couple's interest in natural philosophy and their engagement with the scientific culture of the Spanish Netherlands.

Panel; the composition balances figures and garden architecture, with specific architectural elements of the Coudenberg rendered with enough accuracy to be read as documentary. The figures are smaller in scale than their setting — Brueghel's characteristic subordination of narrative to environment — and their costumes are painted with the fineness expected of court portraiture.