Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Flemish painter, designer, and diplomat. He was the most famous and successful European painter of the Baroque period, being an immensely prolific and versatile master who had a huge influence on his contemporaries and on future generations of artists. His patrons included some of the most powerful and illustrious men and women of his day, and his contacts with them led to his pursuing a secondary career as a diplomat.

Rubens was born in Siegen, Westphalia (now part of Germany), on June 28, 1577; the following day was the feast day of St Peter and St Paul, and this accounts for his Christian names. His father, Jan Rubens, was a lawyer who, having fallen under suspicion of having Protestant sympathies, had fled Antwerp to escape the persecution to which Protestants were being subjected in a city that was strongly Catholic. After Jan’s death in 1587, his widow and children returned to Antwerp. Peter Paul had been baptized a Protestant, but he became a very devout Catholic and much of his later work was done in the service of the Church.

At the age of 13, to help his mother’s finances, Rubens became a page in an aristocratic household, but he soon left to begin an apprenticeship as a painter. He studied successively with three artists in Antwerp, all of them fairly obscure figures: Tobias Verhaecht (a relative through marriage), Adam van Noort, and Otto van Veen. In 1598, at the age of 21, Rubens was accorded the rank of master painter of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, though he continued working for van Veen until 1600.

Few early paintings by Rubens survive, and they suggest that at this stage in his career he was diligent rather than brilliant. However, he blossomed prodigiously during a period of eight years that he spent based in Italy, from 1600 to 1608. Ambitious young artists from northern Europe often visited Italy early in their careers to see the great treasures of ancient and Renaissance art, but Rubens was exceptional in the depth of his immersion in the country’s culture. He became highly knowledgeable about Classical civilization, able to discuss it on equal terms with leading scholars, and he spoke and wrote Italian so fluently that it became his favourite language among the six he knew; in later life he usually signed his letters Pietro Pauolo Rubens.

Soon after arriving in Italy, Rubens was fortunate enough to attract the attention of the art-loving Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Vincenzo’s patronage provided him with a wonderful artistic education, for he visited many of the country’s major cultural centres to make copies of famous pictures for the ducal collection. In 1603-1604 he also visited Spain on Vincenzo’s behalf, as part of a goodwill mission bearing gifts to Philip III. In Madrid he saw the superb Spanish royal art collection, including many pictures by Titian, an artist whom Rubens revered and who influenced him greatly. The most important part of his artistic education, however, Rubens obtained in Rome, where he worked in 1601-1602 and again in 1606-1608. The great masters of the High Renaissance, such as Raphael and Michelangelo, and the finest contemporary Italian painters, particularly Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, were major inspirations of his style, which became powerfully self-confident and full of muscular energy.

Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608 because his mother was very ill; she died before he arrived. He had every intention of returning to his beloved Italy, but he was soon so successful in Antwerp that he remained there. In 1609 he became court painter to Archduke Albert and his wife the Infanta Isabella, who governed the country on behalf of Spain, and in the same year he married Isabella Brant, the daughter of an eminent lawyer.

Rubens had returned to his country at a propitious time for an artist. Until 1609, Flanders (more correctly known as the Spanish Netherlands, to which modern Belgium roughly corresponds) was at war with its northern neighbour (the Dutch Republic, modern Holland). However, in that year the two countries agreed to a 12-year truce; the arts had suffered greatly during the war, and in this period of reconstruction many buildings were rebuilt or redecorated. Rubens was to paint many pictures for Flemish churches, and the works that resoundingly established his reputation as the greatest painter in the country are two huge altarpieces in Antwerp Cathedral: The Raising of the Cross (1609-1610) and The Descent from the Cross (1612-1614).

While he was at work on these paintings, Rubens was transforming a large house that he had bought in Antwerp into a splendid Renaissance-style palace (now the Rubenhuis, a museum dedicated to his work). His studio there was soon full of pupils and assistants, who helped Rubens to carry out the flood of commissions he received. Several of the best painters of the time, including van Dyck, worked for him at one time or another. For many commissions Rubens made a modello (a small preparatory painting) as a guide for his assistants, who translated it into the full-scale work; the master himself would then supply the finishing touches. Rubens was honest and open about his working methods, charging according to the degree of his personal involvement.

In addition to Church, court, and personal commissions in Flanders, Rubens worked for illustrious patrons elsewhere. For example, in 1622-1625 he executed a series of 24 huge paintings, now in the Louvre, for Marie de Médicis (mother of Louis XIII of France) commemorating the events of her life. They show his remarkable ability to combine portraiture, history, and allegory fluently in one scene, and demonstrate his sheer inventiveness in making something so splendid and colourful out of the decidedly unheroic details of Marie’s life.

Having astonishing mental and physical energy, Rubens was never daunted by ambitious, large-scale projects, such as the Marie de Médicis cycle. He painted virtually every type of picture then known, and he also did a good deal of design work, notably of tapestries and title-pages for books. In addition, he was interested in architecture; in 1622 he published a handsome collection of engravings of palaces in Genoa—the first work of its kind to appear in northern Europe.

After the death of the Archduke Albert in 1621, Rubens added another aspect to his formidable versatility, for the widowed Isabella began to value his services as a political adviser. In 1628-1629 he went on a diplomatic mission to Madrid (where he befriended the great Spanish painter Diego Velázquez) and in 1629-1630 he was an envoy at the English court on behalf of Philip IV of Spain. In this role he played a part in restoring peace between England and Spain, a fact of which he was justly proud. The English king, Charles I, was passionate about art and admired Rubens greatly. He knighted him and commissioned from him a series of paintings glorifying the reign of his father James I for the ceiling of the Banqueting House in London’s Whitehall. They were painted in Antwerp, shipped to London, and installed in 1635; they remain there today as the only one of Rubens’s major decorative commissions still surviving intact in its original location.

In 1626 Rubens’s wife died and in 1630 he married the 16-year-old Hélène Fourment, a relative of his first wife. The many pictures that he painted of his two wives and his children show him as a happy and proud husband and father (he had eight children in all, one of them born after his own death). In 1632 he asked to be released from further diplomatic duties and in 1635 he bought a country house at Steen. In the remaining five years of his life he spent much of his time there, developing a new passion for painting landscapes, which he did for his own pleasure rather than for sale. He died of gout in Antwerp on May 30, 1640, aged 62, and was buried in his parish church of St Jacob, where his tomb can still be seen. The detailed bequests in his will, some to people he knew only slightly, show him as a very humane and thoughtful man.

Rubens’s style was underpinned by a confident draughtsmanship that, with his bold brushwork and the great luminosity of his palette, gave his compositions a powerful immediacy and sense of movement. Working on a grand scale, he produced schemes of sweeping grandeur, as in his mythological, religious, and historical paintings; but he was also capable of a very different idiom, as seen in the tender portrayals of members of his own family and the dreamlike intimacy of his late landscapes. His work had a huge impact in Flanders during his lifetime; virtually every significant painter of the time there reflected his style in some way. Partly through his own travels and his international clientele, and partly through engravings after his work, his influence also spread widely outside his own country. He was indeed the overwhelmingly dominant figure of Baroque art in northern Europe. His influence in later centuries was also extensive and varied. Among the painters who responded to different aspects of his genius were Watteau and Delacroix in France and Constable in England. Although landscape played a fairly small part in Rubens’s huge output, Constable regarded him as one of the greatest of all masters of this type of painting.