Albany Fine Art : Biography of Sir Peter Paul RUBENS

Sir Peter Paul RUBENS

Flemish, 1577-1640

Self Portrait, 1623.
© The Royal Collection 2007,
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

The greatest exponent of the Baroque style and one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art

Peter Paul Rubens was the most renowned northern European artist of the 17thC and one of the foremost painters in the canon of Western art. Whilst he was to become an international diplomat, devout Catholic, consummate linguist, shrewd businessman, collector, scholar and intellectual who counted Europe's finest scholars among his friends, he was first and foremost a painter.

Few artists have been capable of transforming such a variety of influences into an utterly new and original style that combined the realistic tradition of Flemish painting with the imaginative freedom and classical themes of the Italian Renaissance. By so doing he fundamentally revitalised and transformed the direction of northern European painting.

Rubens was the greatest exponent of the Baroque style, which blended the northern European sense of realism with the grandeur and monumentality of the Italian Renaissance. His characteristic spontaneity emphasised emotive content, dynamic movement, vivid colour, rich textures and overt sensuality, which he expressed in a huge body of work - historical and allegorical painting, altarpieces, large-scale decorations, landscapes and portraits, as well as in tapestry design, book illustration and other media. It is from Rubens’ many paintings of voluptuous women that the term Rubenesque derives, meaning ‘plump’ or ‘fleshy’. Rubens said, "Painting a young maiden is similar to cavorting with great abandon. It is the finest refreshment."

Rubens was born in 1577 in Siegen, Westphalia to Jan Rubens, a lawyer of ardent Calvinist convictions, and Maria Pypelinckx. His parents had fled the Catholic-dominated city of Antwerp in 1568 to escape religious persecution for their religious beliefs and moved with their children to Cologne. Not long after Rubens’ father was sentenced to death following an affair with the Princess of Orange and Rubens’ mother only succeeded in having her husband freed on condition of the family’s exile to Siegen, Westphalia.

Rubens’ father died in 1587 and his mother moved the family back to Antwerp, where it reverted to Catholicism. He was educated at a Jesuit school in Antwerp where he learned classical and modern languages, he became an accomplished linguist, fluent in six, and served as a page at Court. Whilst his upbringing mirrored the intense religious strife of his age, a fact that was to be of crucial importance in his artistic career, it was financial rather than religious pressures that required Rubens to become a painter rather than a lawyer, as his parents had planned. He therefore become apprenticed to the local Antwerp painters Tobias Verhaecht (Flemish, 1561-1631), Adam van Noort (Flemish 1562-1641) and Otto van Veen (also known by his Latinized names, Otto Vaenius or Venius, Flemish, c.1556-1629).

By the age of 21 Rubens was already a master painter whose aesthetic and religious outlook led him to look to Italy as the place to complete his education, a view in which he was encouraged by Otto van Veen.

Rubens arrived in Venice in 1600. He was hugely influenced by Titian (Italian, c.1485–1576), whose use of radiant colours and majestic forms was to have a formative influence on Rubens's artistic style. He became Court Painter to the Gonzaga (Duke) Vincenzo I of Mantua who was both an art lover as well as collector of exquisite paintings. This appointment is itself a mark of Rubens' stature even at his young age. He was to remain in this role for the next eight years (1600-08) and the Duke's art collection provided a ready source of learning for the young painter. Working principally in Mantua, Rome and Genoa, where the frescoes of Giulio Romano (Italian, c.1499-1546) influenced him greatly, he assimilated the lessons of all the Italian Renaissance masters, such as Titian, Raphael (Raphael Sanzio, Italian, 1483-1520), Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, Italian, 1475-1564) and contemporaries such as Carracci (Annibale Carracci or Caracci, Italian, 1560-1609) and Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Italian, 1571-1610).

In 1603 Rubens travelled to Spain to accompany a collection of paintings and gifts from the Gonzaga to the Spanish King Philip III. Returning to Mantua he painted the first of his important works, The Gonzaga Family Worshipping The Holy Trinity (1604-05).

In late 1608 he received a message that his mother was dying, in Antwerp. He travelled there immediately only to discover that she had already passed away. With his artistic reputation established, however, Rubens decided to remain in Antwerp rather than return to Italy. Since he had also fallen in love with and then married Isabella Brant, who was to bear him three children, these two facts may well have been connected.

In 1609 he was also appointed Painter at the Court to Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, joint sovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands in the Low Countries and the north of modern France, together with his wife, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain. Since court painters were normally required to live and work at the court in Brussels, it is an indication of Rubens’ reputation that he was allowed to remain in Antwerp.

By this time Rubens had already undertaken commissions for his friend, the seven times Burgomaster of Antwerp, Nicholas Rockox, including Samson and Delilah (c.1609-10, in the National Gallery, London) and, from 1611–14 created his early masterpiece, his triptych The Descent from the Cross, depicting the Visitation, Deposition and Presentation of Christ in the Temple (in the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp).

The increasingly large number of commissions he received from across Europe required Rubens to find a new way of working in order to keep up with demand. He relied increasingly on the use of assistants and, in 1611, he purchased a house in the Wapper district of Antwerp which he transformed into a very large studio along the lines of the Italian painters' workshops.

Rubens created a further major innovation, subsequently adopted by many later artists, in his use of small oil studies, rather than drawings, as compositional sketches for his large pictures and tapestry designs. Rather than merely drawing, Rubens' modelli (models) simultaneously established the intended design, colour and lighting of the intended work.

From his workshop, with its many qualified assistants, apprentices and independent colleagues commissioned to work on specific projects, Rubens produced an enormous body of work that spanned paintings and drawings on every subject (which his engravers then reproduced), quantities of book illustrations, tapestry designs and festival decorations. Rubens's personal contribution to the over 3,000 works produced by his studio varied considerably from work to work and he charged his patrons according to the extent of his own involvement. Frans Snyders (Flemish, 1579-1657), Jacob Jordaens (Flemish, 1593-1678) and van Dyck (Sir Anthony van Dyck, Flemish, 1599-1641) were some of his most famous assistants.

However, Rubens’ output was not limited to individual works and he was frequently commissioned to undertake monumental series of decorations for walls and ceilings, as well as sketches for series of wall tapestries. His love of monumental forms and dynamic effects is most readily apparent in the vast decorative schemes he executed in the 1620s, most particularly in the Marie de Medici Cycle, a series of 24 paintings commissioned by and chronicling the life of Queen Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV of France, for the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (1622-25, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Rubens's phenomenal productivity was interrupted from time to time by diplomatic duties. As both a courtier and painter Rubens made repeated visits to Madrid, Paris, and London which allowed him to negotiate treaties while accepting royal commissions for art. In 1625 his royal patrons, Archduke Ferdinand and Archduchess Isabella, required him to conduct negotiations aimed at ending the war between the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic.

Following the death of his wife Isabella in 1626 Rubens returned to Spain in 1628-30, where he met Velázquez (or Velásquez, Spanish, 1599-1660), and there executed some 40 works. It was at this time that King Philip IV asked him to undertake a diplomatic mission to King Charles I of England in 1628 to negotiate a peace treaty between England and Spain (1629-30).

King Charles was so impressed with Rubens's efforts that he knighted the Flemish painter and commissioned his only surviving ceiling painting, The Allegory of War and Peace (1629) for the Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace, London (Cambridge University also awarded him an Honorary Master of Arts degree). Rubens was also knighted by King Philip IV of Spain.

Whilst in England Rubens also created nine paintings of Hélène Fourment, the 17 year-old daughter of his friend, the tapestry merchant, Daniel Fourment. On his return to Antwerp in 1630 he married Hélène, who was to bear him five children.

A devout Roman Catholic, Rubens imbued his many religious paintings with an aggressively religious stance which, along with his deep involvement in public affairs, lent his work a conservative and public character which contrasted sharply with the more personal and secular paintings of his great Dutch contemporary, Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Dutch, 1606–1669).

Rubens’ soul may have lain in the teachings of the Roman Catholic church and Italian classical art but he avoided sterile repetition of academic forms by imbuing his works with a lusty exuberance and almost frenetic energy: glowing colour and light and complex compositions, with a characteristically baroque sense of movement and tactile strength. Rubens's impact was immediate, international and overwhelming. Few contemporary or later artists were immune to his influence, such that a new style of painting came to bear his name.

During the final decade of his life, Rubens again became more a painter than a diplomat and focused increasingly on portraits, landscapes and genre scenes. These later paintings lack the emotive drama of his earlier work but reflect a masterful command of detail and an unflagging technical skill.

Despite recurring attacks of arthritis, Rubens remained an unusually prolific artist throughout his later years, which were largely spent in semi-retirement at his estate of Het Steen near Malines, not far from Antwerp, which he had purchased in 1635, and where he was also able to enjoy the pleasures of being a member of the landed aristocracy for the last five years of his life. He died at the age of 64 in his house at the Wapper in Antwerp and was buried in his parish church of St. Jacob, near the Rubenshuis (Rubens House) in Antwerp.