ART

Rubens’ ‘Phaeton’ on Display: A major early painting by Peter Paul Rubens, “The Fall of Phaeton,” will go on permanent display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on Wednesday--the 350th anniversary of the death of the 17th-Century Flemish master of the Baroque period. The 3-by-4-foot oil, which depicts a dramatic scene from Greek mythology, was bought by the gallery last year from an undisclosed private collection in London for a sum that director J. Carter Brown described only as in the multimillion-dollar range. The painting was cleaned to restore its original colors to their former brilliance and joins the eight other works from Rubens’ later period in the National Gallery’s permanent collection in the West Building. Except for its inclusion in an exhibition in Cologne, West Germany, in 1977, before it was cleaned, “The Fall of the Phaeton” had never been displayed in public.