A brown horse stands in harness on the cobbles of the Wrocław Rynek, waiting for a fare that has not arrived yet. Behind it the Old Town Hall shows its east face, the gilt gable with its blind tracery, the astronomical dial with its gold sun, the stepped brick pinnacles running up either side. A kiosk sells souvenirs from a doorway at the base. A few people sit on the steps of the pillory column.

I took this on 8 May 2014, at about twenty to two in the afternoon. It is the large studio in the Rubens House in Antwerp, the room where Rubens and his assistants turned out the enormous canvases that went to Madrid and Paris and London. I had a very wide lens on the camera that day, which is why the ceiling looks like it belongs to a cathedral. It doesn’t.

A gray afternoon hangs over Manhattan like a held breath, the kind that flattens sound and makes time feel oddly negotiable. The sky is a pale, indifferent sheet, not dramatic enough to be stormy, not generous enough to let light through. In the foreground, the street is wet and slightly reflective, carrying a faint sheen that turns traffic lights and passing buses into soft smudges of color. Pedestrians move with that particular New York efficiency—coats zipped, shoulders slightly hunched, faces forward—walking not just through space but through schedules, obligations, mental lists.