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This energetic sketch shows Henry IV (1553-1610), king of France, entering Paris "in the manner of the triumphs of the Romans," as described in Rubens's contract of 1622. Rubens was to paint forty-eight large canvases for the king's widow, Marie de' Medici, to decorate the Palais de Luxembourg. Those depicting her life (Musée du Louvre, Paris) were finished in 1624, but little of the companion series devoted to her husband was completed before Marie's banishment from France in 1631. The present oil sketch is the last of four in which Rubens worked out his heroic allegory of events from recent history.
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