The Death of Eurydice

The Death of Eurydice, painted around 1636, is among the small mythological panels Rubens produced as preparatory oil sketches for the Torre de la Parada, Philip IV's hunting lodge near Madrid that became the century's most ambitious mythological decoration scheme. Rubens received the commission through the Spanish ambassador in Brussels and organized an enormous workshop campaign to translate his sketches into large-scale canvases — with Jacob Jordaens and other Antwerp painters executing many of the final works under his supervision. The subject from Ovid's Metamorphoses, showing the nymph Eurydice at the moment of her fatal snakebite, was one of dozens of Ovidian scenes Rubens treated in these years, producing the most comprehensive visual translation of the Metamorphoses since Titian's poesie for Philip II a century earlier. Rubens's technique in these sketches is remarkably free — swift transparent strokes that anticipate Rococo handling more than the heavy impasto of his altarpieces — and they represent some of the most spontaneous paintings of his entire career.

The landscape setting is rendered with atmospheric depth characteristic of Rubens's late style, while the figures exhibit a softer, more painterly handling that marks his final period of production.