This landscape has been treated as a pair with Winter (Royal Collection) as they hung together in the collection of the Duke of Buckingham. They are of similar (though not identical) size and depict contrasting seasons and times of day. This landscape may be the ‘Aurora’ mentioned by Edward Norgate as having been at York House (the London residence of the Dukes of Buckingham). Aurora is the goddess of the dawn and there are examples of this name being used as the title of landscapes depicting sunrise, without mythological figures, such as Elsheimer’s tiny copper Aurora of c.1606 (Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick), widely known through Henrick Goudt’s print of 1613.

This scene clearly represents early morning, when everyone sets off for market, even if the sun is relatively high in the sky. There are other examples where Rubens uses the hour to set the mood of a landscape; in Winter it is the approach of nightfall that prompts the characters to huddle round the fire. Here farmers issue from every corner of the landscape, as if called by the rising sun and pour down from the hills into the valley. This metaphor of ‘pouring’ seems to be quite deliberately expressed - in the middle distance a flock of sheep are painted in an ever more coalesced fashion as they move away from us until they become a single molten mass. The way in which the dawn light is painted over the tops of the hills also seems to express this idea of light ‘pouring in’ over the landscape. Rubens was familiar with the pastoral poetry of antiquity and would have believed that landscape painting should be able to match the effects of poetry. This human river leads towards the market town in the middle distance, with a church spire clearly visible. The church and the shafts of light piercing the clouds above (in a moist summer sky) seem to confer a divine blessing on the scene. The landscape also expresses the idea of abundance, which finds a specific personification in the peasant woman riding side-saddle with a copper vessel in the centre - an idealised shoeless figure like that in The Farm at Laken (Royal Collection). Abundance flows from peace - this landscape and Winter are in this sense the archetypal Archduke paintings, expressing the optimism of the Twelve Years Truce.

This is Rubens’s first essay in the Bruegelian panorama (sometimes called Weltlandschaft) and can be compared to Bruegel’s Return of the Herd of 1565 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The terrain is subtly different: though the elevated viewpoint suggests a mountainous landscape, everything beyond the immediate foreground depicts the flat, fertile plains of the Low Countries, with what slight hills may be found exaggerated to create a rolling sea-like terrain. We are looking onto this garden from the fringes of the wilderness - the forest to the left and the mountains to the right. The castle to the left seems to straddle the two worlds - at once a fort - and a formal garden.

The painting appears in Pyne's illustrated 'Royal Residences' of 1819, hanging in the Blue Velvet Room at Buckingham Palace (RCIN 922144).

Along with Winter, original framed by 'Two very large Carv'd & Gilt Picture frames for 2 Landskips of Reubin's ornamented w.^th Festoons & flowers all round ditto w.^th Mosaick work in y.^e Ground & a Canopy of Flowers at y.^e top all in Burnished Gold' (WRA, Geo. 54559)