Landscape with St Philip Baptising the Eunuch

Jan Both studied in Utrecht with Abraham Bloemaert before travelling to Rome where he was acquainted with Claude and Herman van Swanevelt. All three artists worked on a set of large religious and secular landscapes commissioned by Philip IV of Spain in 1640 to decorate his recently built palace, the Buen Retiro, in Madrid (all now in the Prado).

The subject here comes from the Acts of the Apostles (VIII, 26–39), and tells of St Philip on the road meeting a man of Ethiopia, ‘an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians’, whose chariot he shares while discussing Isaiah. Having established that Jesus is the one foretold by the prophet, Philip stops at some water to baptise the eunuch in His name. This is an ideal subject for a landscape because it concerns a journey. The path to the left, which the eunuch will resume, is the ‘true path’, a steep and stony one leading to a hermitage, contrasting with the extensive fertile plain to the right.