Peter Paul Rubens, 'A Landscape with a Shepherd and his Flock', about 1638

One of the challenges of landscape painting is achieving a convincing impression of space, distance, light and air. Here Rubens has produced the effect partly by depicting a point of interest in the right foreground – the shepherd watching over his sheep – then using the strong diagonal lines of the river, the road, the edges of the clouds and the raking light from the low sun to trick our eye. Like the shepherd, we are drawn into gazing out across the patchwork of fields and woodland, the elevated viewpoint giving the impression that we are seeing further into the distance.

Most of Rubens’s landscapes were made in the last five years of his life, when he spent more and more of his time on his new estate in the countryside of Brabant outside Antwerp. Unlike most of his paintings, they were made mostly for his own pleasure rather than as commercial commissions, and many were still in his possession when he died. One of his most famous is also in the National Gallery’s collection: An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, which is named after his estate and depicts the house and the views across the surrounding countryside. This landscape is much smaller, but it depicts a similarly sweeping view. It is probably one of the last pictures he made before illness stopped him painting altogether around the end of 1638.

Most of Rubens’s landscapes were made in the last five years of his life, on his new estate in the countryside of Brabant outside Antwerp. As well as evoking a view, his pictures allude to ideas of rural bliss derived from classical authors, such as Horace and Virgil, in which shepherds, milkmaids or cowherds watch peacefully over their animals in an idyllic landscape. They expressed a poetic yearning for a simple life, free from the stresses of the city; it was an ideal which also seems to have resonated in seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders. In particular, the piping shepherd here has echoes of the Greek god Pan. So Rubens was doing more than reflecting a contemporary pastoral scene – he was demonstrating his literary learning, and, by implication, elevating the countryside of his native land to the same cultural status as that of Roman Italy and Ancient Greece.

To enhance the idyll, Rubens has depicted the sun breaking through the clouds just above the horizon. It has generally been assumed that this must represent a sunset, but there is nothing to indicate this definitively. While there are hints of pink on the clouds near the sun, they are not as strong we might expect of a late-summer sunset on a cloudy evening, and the white sheen on the distant fields, might be dew. This could conceivably be dawn – the time of day depicted in Het Steen.

The hat worn by the shepherd, with its wide, sweeping brim, is an unusually debonair one for a man of very moderate means. It is certainly of a more dashing style than those worn by country folk in paintings by Rubens’s Flemish contemporary Teniers, for example. But it is similar to the one worn by Rubens himself in a self portrait he made about ten years earlier (Rubenshuis, Antwerp). It might be fanciful to suggest that he was identifying personally with the shepherd in question, but there are parallels of which he was surely aware: this is a landscape which has inspired him to paint, just as it seems to inspire the shepherd to play his pipe.