A Rare Masterwork for Getty

The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a rare collaborative work by Flemish masters Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder in honor of the museum’s retired director.

The acquisition, to be announced on Monday, is titled “The Return From War: Mars Disarmed by Venus.” An allegory of peace, painted around 1610 to 1612, it depicts the nude Roman goddess of love divesting the god of war of his armor.

Getty officials declined to disclose the purchase price of the painting, which came from the trust of Southside House, a private estate in Wimbledon, England. Sources outside the museum said the acquisition was certainly a multimillion-dollar deal.

Measuring 50 1/2 by 64 1/2 inches, the oil-on-panel work will command a prominent space at the museum’s East Pavilion when it goes on view in mid-January.

The acquisition is a tribute to John Walsh, who retired last year after 17 years as museum director. Museum officials said Walsh is a noted scholar of 17th century Dutch painting.

Walsh masterminded the expansion of the Getty’s art collections during a period of enormous growth and oversaw the design and installation of the museum at the Getty Center, which opened in 1997.

Scot Schaefer, curator of paintings at the Getty, said the painting is “very, very beautiful.” Recently cleaned in the museum’s conservation laboratory and now awaiting a special frame, “The Return From War” is a prime example of Rubens’ and Brueghel’s collaborative work and the only one with a secular theme, he said. Other paintings created by the pair are in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and several European institutions.

In the meantime, “The Return From War” joins several works in the Getty’s collection created individually by the two artists. Among them are a painting, “Entombment,” and a group of oil sketches by Rubens.

Brueghel is represented by two major paintings, “Entry of the Animals Into Noah’s Art” and “Landscape With the Preaching of Saint John the Baptist.”