Tom Volkaert

In Elewijt, Rubens found an abundance of inspiration in the diverse facets of nature. He sketched pollard willows, wild blackberries, and detailed fragments of the marshy landscape with streams and bridges. On one of his drawings, he wrote evocatively: Thee Shadow of a Tree is greatter in ye watter / and more parfect then ye trees themselves and / darker.*” This observation speaks to the powerful and moving impression this place made on him at twilight, which is still palpable to this day.

*The trees reflect in the water browner and much more perfectly than the trees themselves

Tom Volkaert

Peter Paul Rubens, Trees reflected in water at sunset, black, red and orange chalks, heightened with white, on buff paper, 276 x 454 mm, London, The British Museum, inv. Gg,2.229. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.