The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis

Peter Paul Rubens · 1636

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

27 × 42.6 cm (10 5/8 × 16 3/4 in.); Framed: 42.2 × 57.8 × 6.4 cm (16 5/8 × 22 3/4 × 2 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Rubens brings the mythological wedding of the sea-nymph Thetis and the mortal hero Peleus to life with the kind of swirling, luminous energy that only he could sustain across a crowded divine assembly. By 1636, Rubens was in his late career and working with a fluency that bordered on effortless — his brushwork looser, his compositions more dynamically compressed. This work is an oil sketch on panel, a *modello* of the type Rubens used to work out complex multi-figure mythological scenes before committing to a larger canvas. These sketches are prized in their own right for the spontaneity they preserve, where you can almost follow the painter's thinking in real time through the warm, translucent layering of paint. The wedding feast depicted here carries a shadow of catastrophe: this is the celebration to which Eris, goddess of discord, was not invited — her revenge, the golden apple thrown among the guests, set in motion the chain of events that would eventually ignite the Trojan War. Our hand-painted oil reproduction honours that same layered, gestural quality, rendered by a skilled artist working in oils on canvas and attentive to every shift of tone and movement in the original.