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having expressed to Mr. Gage that you would determine on making some exchange with me of those marbles for pictures by my hand, I, as being fond of antiques, would readily be disposed to accept any reasonable offer, should Y.E. continue in the same mind.’ He would, he wrote, send a list of paintings for Carleton to choose from.31 A month later the list arrived, including the dimensions of each work. They included an oversized crucifixion scene (twelve feet by six feet) of a kind that a collector of Protestant persuasion could not comfortably have hanging on the walls of his gallery, and an even larger Last Judgement. Carleton declined these, and Rubens agreed to substitute more suitable items. After further negotiations, since no tapestries could be found that met Carleton’s high standard of design and execution, it was decided by further negotiation that Rubens would pay Carleton the sum of two thousand florins in cash in their place.

In late May, Rubens wrote to Carleton to tell him that he had agreed the final list of paintings and their measurements with ‘that Man of Your Excellency’s who came to take them’, and had come to an agreement to have gilt frames supplied for them at his own expense. He assured Carleton that the pictures would all be his own work, rather than studio productions, and promised that they would be dispatched to him as soon as possible:

I cannot, however, affirm so precisely as I could wish, the exact day when all these pictures will be dry, and to speak the truth, it appears to me better that they should go away together, because the first are newly retouched; still, with the aid of the sun, if it shines serene and without wind (the which stirring up the dust is injurious to newly painted pictures) will be in a fit state to be rolled up with five or six days of fine weather.32

A note among Carleton’s papers records that the final list of paintings was brought to him in The Hague, from Antwerp, by ‘Mr Hugins’ – doubtless the same ‘Mr Huygens’ (Constantijn senior) who was about to set off with Carleton on his diplomatic voyage to London.33

On 1 June 1618 Rubens confirmed in writing that he had taken delivery of his statues.34 They included allegories of Peace, Justice and Abundance, a Diana and a Jupiter, busts of Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Drusus, Germanicus, Trajan, Nero and Domitian, as well as Augustus and Julius Caesar, and burial urns, tablets and inscriptions, putti and dolphins. Ten days after the deal had been settled, and knowing that he would eventually recoup his outlay of money for them in the desirable form of artworks by the great Dutch painter Pieter Paul Rubens, Carleton and his ambassadorial party (including the young Constantijn Huygens) arrived in London. He could now concentrate on recovering cash, or goods in lieu, for the Italian paintings which the Earl of Arundel had taken off his hands with alacrity two years earlier. (In the end, apparently, Danvers’s interest had waned, and Arundel took almost the entire collection.)

The deal struck between Carleton and Rubens to ‘unload’ the consignment of antique statuary was the beginning of an extremely fruitful relationship between the two men as artist and backer, and led to Rubens acquiring a string of prominent patrons at the English court. Carleton claimed that his successful exporting back to the Continent of the Venetian antiquities, and their replacement by a collection of outstanding works of art by Rubens, had caused a radical change in fashions for collecting in England, replacing antiquities with modern Netherlandish paintings. Carleton having publicly preferred the paintings to antiquities, the vogue in court collecting had followed suit, to the annoyance of English artists: ‘I am blamed by the painters of this country who make ydoles of these heads and statuas, but all others commend the change.’35

It is likely that the Earl of Arundel – one of England’s most prominent connoisseurs of paintings and statuary – had already played some part in the acquisition of Carleton’s consignment of artworks. Having eventually