Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen, 1577 - Antwerp, 1640) was the most influential painter of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Born in the Holy Roman Empire to parents who had fled Antwerp for their Calvinist faith, he spent most of his working life in the city they had left, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. His paintings, full of movement, colour and sensuality, shaped the look of Catholic Baroque art in northern Europe during the first half of the seventeenth century. He matters as much for the large workshop he ran, for his work as a diplomat and for the way he combined a deep study of classical antiquity with the Flemish tradition of close observation.

Origins and training

His father, Jan Rubens, was a lawyer who had served as an alderman in Antwerp before converting to Calvinism. In 1568 the family fled to Cologne because of religious persecution. Jan later became involved with Anna of Saxony, the second wife of William of Orange, which led to his imprisonment and to a sentence confining him to Siegen, where Peter Paul was born. After Jan died in 1587, his widow took her children back to Antwerp, by then reconverted to Catholicism. The young Rubens received a humanist education at a Latin school, where he studied Latin and classical literature alongside Balthasar Moretus, grandson of the printer Christophe Plantin.

Family hardship forced him to work early. He first served as a page to Countess Margaretha de Ligne-Arenberg at Oudenaarde, but his real interest lay in drawing. As a boy he had copied prints by Hans Holbein the Younger, Tobias Stimmer and Marcantonio Raimondi. Around 1592 he began an apprenticeship with the landscape painter Tobias Verhaecht, but after about a year he left to pursue history painting. He then worked with Adam van Noort, one of the so-called Romanists, artists who had travelled to Rome and returned with Italian models. His last master was Otto van Veen, who gave him the ideal of the pictor doctus, the learned painter who knows art theory, classical literature and the masters of the Renaissance. Rubens completed his apprenticeship in 1598 and that same year entered the Antwerp Guild of St Luke as an independent master.

Italy and the discovery of the masters

In 1600 he travelled to Italy with his first pupil, Deodat del Monte. In Venice he saw the work of Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, whose colour and composition left a lasting mark on his palette. He soon entered the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, a keen collector. His duties included portraits of the ducal family, copies of works in the collection and the decoration of the palaces. With the duke's backing he went to Rome in 1601, where he studied Greek and Roman art, especially the Hellenistic group of Laocoön and His Sons, and copied works by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo. He was also struck by the naturalism of Caravaggio, whose work he later defended, for example by recommending that the duke acquire The Death of the Virgin.

In Rome he completed his first major altarpiece commission, a triptych for the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In 1603 he was sent to Spain on a diplomatic errand, delivering gifts from the duke to Philip III and to his favourite, the Duke of Lerma. He landed at Alicante and, finding the court had moved to Valladolid, travelled there overland. During his stay he painted the equestrian Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, notable for its balance and vigour and for its foreshortening of the horse, and some works on the busts of apostles, now in the Prado. This journey began a long pattern in which art and diplomacy went together.

Between 1604 and 1608 he remained in Italy, first in Mantua and then in Genoa and Rome. In Genoa he painted many aristocratic portraits, including the Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria and the portrait of Maria Serra Pallavicino, often considered among his finest, whose manner later influenced Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough. There he also made the drawings of the city's palaces that were published in 1622 as Palazzi di Genova. The book spread the Genoese palace model across northern Europe and gave him a model for his own house in Antwerp. In Rome, between 1606 and 1608, he received his most important commission so far: the high altar of Santa Maria in Vallicella, the Chiesa Nuova. The first version, a single canvas of saints adoring the Virgin and Child, was soon replaced by a version on three slate panels, with a removable copper cover, also painted by him, that allowed the miraculous image to be shown on special feast days. Romans, unused to Flemish painting, were struck by the new manner.

What he learned in Italy stayed with him for life. He went on writing letters in Italian, signed himself as Pietro Pauolo Rubens and often spoke of his longing to return, a wish that never came true.

Antwerp and the workshop

In late 1608 he set out for Antwerp on hearing that his mother was ill, but she died on 19 October before he arrived. He had planned to go back to Italy, yet the situation in Antwerp kept him there. The city was then hopeful after the Treaty of Antwerp, signed on 9 April 1609, which opened the Twelve Years' Truce between Spain and the United Provinces, and it expected a revival of its commerce. In that setting the city council commissioned from him The Adoration of the Kings for the Chamber of the Estates, where the negotiations were held. The subject alluded discreetly to the benefits the city hoped to gain from the agreement. The painting, now in the Prado, earned him 1,800 florins.

In September 1609 he became court painter to the governors of Flanders, Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, with an annual salary and permission to live in Antwerp rather than at the court in Brussels and to take other clients. On 3 October 1609 he married Isabella Brant, daughter of a learned and wealthy municipal official with whom he kept a close relationship. In 1610 he moved into a house he had bought and rebuilt to his own design, mixing Italian Renaissance models, especially Genoese palaces, with Baroque and Flemish elements. The house, now the Rubenshuis, held his workshop, library and one of the largest art collections in the city. Since 1946 it has been a museum, although only the portico and the garden pavilion of the original survive.

His altarpieces for the cathedral of Our Lady, The Raising of the Cross (1610) and The Descent from the Cross (1611-1614), established him as Flanders' leading painter. The first combines Tintoretto's Crucifixion for the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice, Michelangelo's dynamic figures and his own personal style, and it is regarded as a prime example of Baroque religious art.

He ran a large workshop of apprentices, assistants and specialists. His most famous pupil was Anthony van Dyck, whom Rubens himself judged the best of his students. He often collaborated with Frans Snyders, a painter of animals and still lifes, and with his friend Jan Brueghel the Elder, a flower painter. The workshop executed parts of paintings, supervised copies and produced prints. Rubens was especially active in graphic work. He designed book illustrations, above all for Balthasar Moretus, and issued engravings under his own control to spread his fame and to counter unauthorised reproductions, particularly in the United Provinces. He obtained privileges for his prints in several territories and hired engravers such as Lucas Vorsterman, Paulus Pontius and Willem Panneels. He was a demanding employer, and his dealings with Vorsterman, who left the workshop under pressure, show how hard he could be on his collaborators.

Diplomatic missions and the Marie de' Medici cycle

In 1621 Marie de' Medici, the Queen Mother of France, commissioned from him two large allegorical cycles on her life and that of her late husband, Henry IV, for the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The cycle devoted to the queen, made up of twenty-one canvases plus portraits, was completed in late 1624 and installed in 1625. It is now in the Louvre. The series on Henry IV was never finished, although he made some preliminary sketches.

After the Truce ended in 1621, the Spanish Habsburgs entrusted him with diplomatic missions. Between 1627 and 1630 he moved between the courts of Spain and England in an attempt to secure peace between the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic, and he also visited the Dutch Republic as both artist and diplomat. Some courtiers did not accept a man who worked with his hands as an equal, while many others received him as a gentleman. Philip IV ennobled him in 1624 at the request of Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, who also named him gentleman of the chamber. Charles I of England ennobled him in 1630, and Cambridge University awarded him an honorary Master of Arts in 1629.

In September 1628 he arrived in Madrid for a second visit, staying until April 1629. He was lodged in the Alcázar and became friends with the court painter Diego Velázquez. It was Rubens who urged Velázquez to travel to Italy to complete his training, and the two agreed to go together, but Rubens went back to Antwerp and Velázquez made the journey alone. During that stay he painted works for the king and the Marquis of Leganés, and he copied many paintings by Titian from the royal collection. An inventory after his death lists no fewer than thirty copies after the Venetian master. The following year he went to London, where he painted the Allegory of Peace and War (1629), now in the National Gallery, which he gave to Charles I as a gift and which expresses his commitment to peace.

The last decade and Het Steen

In 1630, four years after the death of Isabella Brant, he married Hélène Fourment, sixteen years old and daughter of a silk and tapestry merchant, who was also the niece-in-law of his first wife. He was fifty-three. They had five children, the last born in 1641, eight months after the painter's death. Hélène became his main model in the 1630s, and she is recognisable in many of the voluptuous female figures of those years, in The Judgement of Paris and The Three Graces, both in the Prado, and in Helena Fourment Coming from Her Bath. He also painted several portraits of her.

In this decade he continued to take commissions from the Spanish court. Philip IV asked for paintings for the Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge outside Madrid, mostly scenes from classical mythology, many realised with the help of his workshop. Charles I commissioned ceiling paintings for Inigo Jones's Banqueting House at Whitehall. At the same time he explored a more personal kind of painting, much of which he never meant to sell.

In 1635 he bought the estate of Het Steen at Elewijt, in the countryside near Antwerp, where he spent much of his time. He had painted landscapes since the late 1610s, but owning the estate led him to devote himself to the genre more intensely. A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, in the National Gallery in London, and Farmers Returning from the Fields, in the Palatine Gallery in Florence, show an exuberant nature and a highly personal style. He died on 30 May 1640 in Antwerp, aged sixty-two, of heart failure brought on by the chronic gout he suffered from. He was buried in the church of St James in the city. In 1642 his widow had placed over his grave a painting of The Virgin and Child with Saints, in which it is believed that the painter portrayed himself as St George and Hélène as Mary Magdalene.

Style and technique

Rubens's paintings are recognisable for their vivid colour, taken from the Venetian school and above all from Titian, and for the movement of their compositions. His male figures are muscular, under the influence of Michelangelo, and his female figures are sensual, often foreshortened and painted with loose, fluid brushwork. He worked on panel longer than many of his contemporaries, even for very large pictures, though he also used canvas, especially for works that had to travel far. For some altarpieces he used slate to reduce glare. His subjects were varied: religious, historical, mythological and allegorical scenes, hunts, landscapes and portraits. According to Michael Jaffé's catalogue he produced 1,403 works, leaving aside the copies made in his workshop, and about fifteen hundred paintings survive together with almost nine thousand drawings.

His graphic and design work was equally large: cartoons for tapestries, such as the series on the history of Decius Mus, Constantine, the Triumph of the Eucharist and the story of Achilles, and frontispieces and illustrations for Antwerp publishers. He also made drawings in red chalk, a technique he used throughout his career.

Legacy

Rubens died wealthy and widely admired, and his influence was broad. Van Dyck, trained in his workshop, carried his manner to England, and collaborators such as Jordaens, Quellinus and Thulden carried it on in Flanders and the north. His name gave rise to the adjective Rubenesque, used for a generous female figure, and his model of the learned painter who could deal with rulers and master the theory of art became a reference for later academies. Today the largest collection of his works is in the Prado, with about ninety paintings, although the figure varies according to the attribution of some pieces. Important works also survive in the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.