Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens, (born June 28, 1577, Siegen, Nassau,

Westphalia [Germany]—died May 30, 1640, Antwerp, Spanish
Netherlands [now in Belgium]), Flemish painter who was the
greatest exponent of Baroque painting’s dynamism, vitality, and
sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits
and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious
and mythological compositions. As the impresario of vast
decorative programs, he presided over the most famous painter’s
studio in Europe. His powers of invention were matched by
extraordinary energy and versatility.

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Education and early career
Rubens was born in the German town of Siegen, in Westphalia.
His father, Jan Rubens, a lawyer and alderman of Antwerp, had
fled the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium) in 1568 with
his wife, Maria Pypelinckx, and four children to escape religious
persecution for his Calvinist beliefs. After Jan’s death in 1587, the
family returned to Antwerp, where young Peter Paul, raised in his
mother’s Roman Catholic faith, received a Classical education. His
artistic training began in 1591 with his apprenticeship to Tobias
Verhaecht, a kinsman and landscape painter of modest talent. A
year later he moved on to the studio of Adam van Noort, where he
remained for four years until being apprenticed to Antwerp’s
leading artist, Otto van Veen, dean of the painters’ guild of St.
Luke. Van Veen imbued Rubens with a lively sense of painting as a
lofty humanistic profession.

Most of Rubens’s youthful works have disappeared or remain

unidentified. The Portrait of a Young Man (1597) is his earliest
dated work. In 1598 Rubens was admitted into the painters’ guild
in Antwerp. He probably continued to work in van Veen’s studio
before setting off on a sojourn in Italy in May 1600. In Venice he
absorbed the luminosity and dramatic expressiveness of the
Renaissance masterpieces of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.
Hired by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, duke of Mantua, Rubens proceeded
to Mantua, where his chief duties were to make copies
of Renaissance paintings, mainly portraits of court beauties. In
October 1600 Rubens accompanied the duke to Florence to attend
the marriage-by-proxy of Gonzaga’s sister-in-law Marie de
Médicis to King Henry IV of France, a scene Rubens was to re-
create a quarter-century later for the queen. By the end of the first
year he had traveled throughout Italy, sketchbook in hand. The
copies he made of Renaissance paintings offer a rich survey of the
achievements of 16th-century Italian art.

In August 1601 Rubens arrived in Rome. There the new Baroque

style heralded by Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio—a bold
naturalism coupled with a revival of the heroically idealized forms
of Michelangelo and Raphael—was quickly assimilated by Rubens.
His first major Roman commission was for three large paintings
(1601–02) for the crypt chapel of St. Helena in the Basilica
of Santa Croce. In 1603 Gonzaga sent him on his first diplomatic
assignment to Spain to present a shipment of paintings to King
Philip III. For Philip’s prime minister, the duke of Lerma, Rubens
painted his first major equestrian portrait (1603), which took the
Venetian tradition of Titian and Tintoretto a giant step forward in
the conveyance of physical power and psychological confrontation.
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Toward the end of 1605 Rubens made his second trip to Rome.
With his brother Philip he undertook an intensive study of ancient
art and philology and began to amass a sizable collection of
Roman sculpture, reliefs, portrait busts, and ancient coins. In
1606 he received his crowning commission in Rome: the painting
over the high altar of the Chiesa Nuova (Church of Santa Maria in
Vallicella), whose precious icon Rubens enshrined in
an apotheosis borne aloft by a host of putti—a quintessentially
Baroque conceit that was later adapted in sculpture by Gian
Lorenzo Bernini.

Return to Antwerp
In October 1608, having received news that his mother was
gravely ill, Rubens rushed home to Antwerp—but too late. Yet
despite his personal loss, his arrival was otherwise timely. His
brother Philip had been appointed secretary of Antwerp. More
important, negotiations for the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–21)
were being concluded between the Dutch separatists and Spain,
which raised the prospects of peace and economic recovery for
war-torn Flanders. Rubens was commissioned to paint for the
Antwerp Town Hall a celebratory Adoration of the Magi (1609),
which quickly established his fame at home. Though he still
yearned for Italy, the Spanish Habsburg regents of
Flanders, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, made him an
offer too good to refuse. As their new court painter, Rubens was
exempted from all taxes, guild restrictions, and official duties
in Brussels. He could remain in Antwerp and organize his own
studio. In October 1609 Rubens married the 19-year-old Isabella
Brant, and he celebrated their happy union in his Double Portrait
in a Honeysuckle Bower (1609–10). In 1610 Rubens bought a
magnificent townhouse to which he annexed a palatial studio,
Classical portico, and garden pavilion—an Italian villa
transplanted to Antwerp.

The Twelve Years’ Truce prompted a major refurbishing of

Flemish churches. The first of Rubens’s two great Antwerp
triptychs, The Raising of the Cross (1610–11), combined Italianate
reflections of Tintoretto and Caravaggio with Flemish realism in a
heroic affirmation of redemptive suffering. His second triptych for
Antwerp’s cathedral, The Descent from the Cross (1611–14), is
more Classical and restrained in keeping with its subject. This
work reflected Rubens’s vigorous renewal of the early
Netherlandish tradition of Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling,
and Rogier van der Weyden. Its widespread fame was ensured by
the publication of an engraving; among its future admirers was the
young Rembrandt.

The decade from 1610 to 1620 witnessed an enormous production

of altarpieces for Roman Catholic churches—powerful, emotive
images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints—as Rubens
became the chief artistic proponent of Counter-
Reformation spirituality in northern Europe. Among his more
important religious compositions from this period are The Last
Judgment (c. 1616) and Christ on the Cross (also called Le Coup
de Lance, 1620). Yet during this same decade Rubens also
produced many paintings on secular themes—mythological,
historical, and allegorical subjects, hunting scenes, and portraits.
Among the finest of his mythological paintings is the Rape of the
Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1617–18), while The Hippopotamus
Hunt (c. 1615–16) typifies his vision of wild animal hunts.

Peter Paul Rubens: The Hippopotamus Hunt

The Hippopotamus Hunt, oil on canvas by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1615–16; in the Alte
Pinakothek, Munich.

Alte Pinakothek, Munich; photograph, Joachim Blauel/Artothek

Rubens was able to maintain this tremendous output owing to his
large studio of assistants, apprentices, collaborators, and
engravers. A major painting would often begin as a modello—i.e.,
an oil sketch painted by Rubens on a small panel, after which he
would make preparatory drawings of individual figures within
the composition. The execution of the full-scale work would often
be entrusted to assistants, though Rubens would usually paint key
areas and thoroughly retouch the finished painting. Many of
Rubens’s paintings were then reproduced in engravings, thereby
guaranteeing the wide dissemination of his compositions
throughout Europe.

The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1617; in the Alte
Pinakothek, Munich, Ger.

Scala/Art Resource, New York

Rubens’s most talented assistant was the young Anthony van

Dyck, 22 years his junior, who arrived at his studio as an
apprentice about 1616 and stayed for four years. A true prodigy,
van Dyck quickly absorbed Rubens’s robust style—his muscular,
graceful physiques and sensuous interplays of light and colour—
and faithfully imitated it under the master’s supervision. Rubens’s
own coproductions with specialists such as the animal
painter Frans Snyders and the flower-landscapist Jan
Bruegel mark the Baroque zenith of artistic collaboration. At the
same time, his Four Continents (c. 1615), Lion
Hunt (1621), Landscape with Carters (c. 1618), and many sketches
from nature reveal his own versatility in the specialized areas
of landscape and animal painting.
In 1616 Rubens received his first tapestry commission, a series
depicting the life of the legendary Roman consul Decius Mus. For
each scene he painted a modello, which his assistants then
enlarged into a full-scale canvas whose imagery was then
duplicated in a tapestry by weavers. From Sir Dudley Carleton, the
English ambassador to The Hague, Rubens acquired in 1618 a vast
collection of ancient sculptures. His interest in sculpture was not
limited to collecting. He designed monumental sculpture for the
facade and interior of the magnificent new Jesuit church (now St.
Charles Borromeo) in Antwerp, which was dedicated in 1621. He
also contributed to the church’s architectural design. Its high altar,
enshrining his two interchangeable altarpieces devoted to Saints
Ignatius and Francis Xavier (1617–18), was crowned by a
semidome and illuminated by an oculus, resembling Rubens’s own
recently completed “pantheon” for sculpture in his home. In 1620
Rubens contracted to design 39 ceiling paintings for the Jesuit
church, to be executed by van Dyck and other assistants after his
oil sketches revealing “the great speed and frenzy of his brush.”
Finished within a year, these paintings justified Rubens’s claim to
be “by natural instinct, better fitted to execute very large works
than small curiosities.”

In 1621, following the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce and

the death of Archduke Albert, the widowed
infanta Isabella engaged Rubens as her confidential agent in
Spain’s diplomatic search for peace between Habsburg-controlled
Flanders and the independent Dutch Republic to the north. (The
war between the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic Flemings
resumed, however, and was sadly to continue for the rest of
Rubens’s life.) By this time Rubens’s widespread fame as “the
painter of princes and the prince of painters” permitted him to
travel freely among royal courts for discreet meetings
with sovereigns and their ministers, who would discuss matters of
state while sitting for portraits.

In 1622 Rubens was called to Paris by the queen mother of

France, Marie de Médicis, to decorate one of the two main
galleries of her newly built Luxembourg Palace. The widow of
Henry IV sought to promote, in 21 huge canvases (1622–25), her
life and her regency of France in epic fashion. Marie’s thwarted
career required an unprecedented exercise of poetic license, but by
exploiting his encyclopaedic knowledge of Classical mythology
and allegory, Rubens raised her life to a mythic plane on which
mortals mingle freely with the Olympian gods. At the same time,
he designed for Louis XIII a tapestry cycle on the life of the
emperor Constantine (1622–25). During the 1625 marriage-by-
proxy in Paris of King Louis’s sister, Henrietta Maria, to King
Charles I of England, Rubens met the duke of Buckingham, who
commissioned Rubens to paint his equestrian portrait (1625;
destroyed), the epitome of High Baroque flamboyance in
that genre.

Several paintings by the famous artist Peter Paul Rubens show events from the life of Marie de
Médicis. Marie was a member of the Medici family who became queen of France.

© Tupungato/Dreamstime.com

Rubens complained that he was “the busiest and most harassed

man in the world,” yet he continued to accept
important ecclesiastical commissions. His Adoration of the
Magi (1624) for the Abbey of St. Michael was crowned by three
monumental sculptures of his own design. For the high altar of
Antwerp’s cathedral he framed his Assumption of the
Virgin (1624–27) with a marble portico that featured a typically
Baroque interplay of painting and sculpture, spiritually “charging”
the surrounding space.

Nor did Rubens neglect private patrons. In the 1620s he executed

masterly portraits of his physician and friend Ludovicus Nonnius
(c. 1627), of his future sister-in-law Susanna Fourment (Le
Chapeau de Paille, c. 1622–25), and of his sons Albert and
Nicolaas (c. 1624–25). His Landscape with Philemon and
Baucis (c. 1625) reveals, in a poetic vein, his heroic and
cataclysmic view of nature. In 1625 the infanta Isabella
commissioned from Rubens a vast tapestry cycle, the Triumph of
the Eucharist (1625–27). For these 20 separate hangings, which
form his most elaborate and complex program of religious art,
Rubens invented a two-tiered architectural framework featuring
tapestries-within-tapestries, an unprecedented display of Baroque
illusionism.

Peter Paul Rubens: portrait of Anne of Austria

Anne of Austria, oil on canvas by Peter Paul Rubens, 1621–25; in the Louvre Museum, Paris. 85
× 37 cm.

© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
In 1626 Rubens’s domestic happiness was shattered by the death
of his wife Isabella. He soon embarked on a diplomatic odyssey in
search of a peace between England and Spain as a first step toward
negotiating a settlement with the Dutch Republic, which was
England’s ally. The duke of Buckingham, who was the favourite of
King Charles of England, was negotiating to purchase Rubens’s
entire collection of antiquities. In the course of their meetings,
Rubens tried to convince the skeptical Buckingham that England
should cease supporting the Dutch in their struggle against
Spanish rule in Flanders. Initially, the Spanish king, Philip IV, was
aghast that such diplomacy be entrusted to a mere painter. But in
August 1628 Rubens left for the Spanish court in Madrid en route
to England.

During his seven months in Madrid, besides pleading for a peace

treaty with England, Rubens spent his time in the royal art gallery
painting copies of masterpieces by Titian, to whose style he was
now completely attuned as he explored the great Venetian’s fluent
brushwork, vibrant colours, and luminous modeling. Looking over
his shoulder was Philip IV’s young court painter, Diego Velázquez.
By April 1629, England was ready to negotiate, and Charles I sent
for Rubens directly, indicating his eagerness to meet a man with
his international reputation for intellect and artistic genius. Philip
IV gave Rubens the title of “secretary of the king’s privy council of
the Netherlands” in order to elevate the standing of his painter-
envoy at the foreign court.

In London, Rubens encountered a maze of factions and intrigues

through which he had to negotiate. Yet he prevailed, and it is to
him personally that the peace treaty of 1630 between England and
Spain can be attributed. He was awarded an honorary master of
arts degree from the University of Cambridge. Awaiting the arrival
of the Spanish ambassador, he painted his effusive Allegory of
Peace and War (1629–30) as a memento of his successful
diplomacy and gave it to the admiring English king. In turn,
Charles awarded Rubens a long-coveted commission to decorate
the ceiling of the royal Banqueting House, which had recently been
designed by the architect Inigo Jones as part of the Whitehall
Palace complex of buildings in London. On the eve of his
departure from England, Rubens was knighted by King Charles.

Peter Paul Rubens

QUICK FACTS

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BORN

June 28, 1577

Siegen, Germany
DIED

May 30, 1640 (aged 62)

Antwerp, Belgium

MOVEMENT / STYLE

 Baroque art and architecture

 Flemish art
 Stuart style
Later career

Back in Antwerp, Rubens was finally able to devote himself to his

“beloved profession” again. In December 1630 he married the 16-
year-old Helena Fourment, youngest daughter of the silk
and tapestry merchant Daniel Fourment. Helena was to inspire
some of the most personal and poignant portraits of Rubens’s later
career, and their marriage was as fruitful as it was blissful,
producing five children. Rubens often identified Helena with the
goddess Venus, as in his glowing Venus and Adonis (c. 1635). In
1631 Philip IV knighted Rubens—the only painter so honoured by
the kings of both England and Spain. Having lost all taste for
politics, Rubens finally retired from his diplomatic career.

Peter Paul Rubens: Venus and Adonis

Venus and Adonis, oil on canvas by Peter Paul Rubens, mid- or late 1630s; in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City.

Photograph by Katie Chao. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, gift of
Harry Payne Bingham, 1937 (37.162)

The twilight decade of 1630–40 witnessed some of the most

exuberant works of the rejuvenated master as he broadened his
painterly style with looser, more tactile, almost “impressionistic”
brushwork. In his Garden of Love (c. 1630–32), a
marital allegory imbued with personal significance, an invented
statue of Venus presides over a gathering of lovers, while in his
more archaeological Feast of Venus (c. 1636) another statue of
Venus presides over a clamorous pagan bacchanal. With similar
abandon, Rubens’s Kermesse (c. 1630–35) evokes the spirit of the
painter Pieter Bruegel in the joie de vivre of its dancing peasants.

For his new father-in-law, Rubens designed his fourth and final
tapestry cycle, the Life of Achilles (c. 1631–32). After completing a
radiant, autumnal vision of Roman Catholic spirituality in the
triptych of the Ildefonso Altarpiece (1630–32), he turned his
attention to glorifying the reign of King Charles’s father, James I,
in nine huge canvases for the Whitehall ceiling (1632–34), his
translation of Italianate ceiling painting into England.

In December 1633 the infanta Isabella died. Her nephew and

successor, the infante Ferdinand, was welcomed as the new
governor by a series of triumphal arches and stages designed by
Rubens and erected along the processional route through
Antwerp. These temporary monuments of architecture, sculpture,
and painting required a virtual army of carpenters, sculptors, and
painters all working under Rubens as impresario. This grandest,
though somewhat ephemeral, of all his undertakings was later
preserved in a volume of etchings by Theodoor van Thulden. On a
smaller scale, Rubens continued to design book title-pages for the
Plantin-Moretus Press in Antwerp, owned by his childhood friend
Balthasar Moretus.

At his country estate, Het Steen in Elewijt, which he purchased in

1635, Rubens painted his glowing Landscape with a
Rainbow (1636) and its pendant Landscape with Het
Steen (1636). These complementary views of a countryside
teeming with life celebrate the natural order of creation and
present an Arcadian vision of humankind in harmony with nature.
Such pictures alone, permeated with shimmering colour and light,
would ensure Rubens’s fame as a landscapist, if no other works
survived. For Philip IV’s hunting lodge outside Madrid, the Torre
de la Parada, Rubens painted more than 60 oil sketches inspired
by Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which he reinterpreted the loves,
conflicts, and passions of ancient gods and mortals.

Despite frequent incapacitating attacks of “gout” (which was

probably arthritis), Rubens continued to accept a wide range of
commissions. In 1638 he designed a triumphal carriage, or parade
“float,” in the form of a ship to celebrate the Spanish naval victory
over the Dutch forces at Calloo. Yet his personal view of war
remained deeply pessimistic, as revealed in his painting The
Horrors of War (1637), a precursor of Picasso’s Guernica. Two of
Rubens’s late portraits now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in
Vienna contrast the public man and his private world. His
stately Self-Portrait (c. 1638) presents Rubens not as an artist but
as a self-confident and proud—if aging and visibly weary—knight
wearing the sword of Charles I. By contrast, Het Pelsken (c. 1636–
38) reveals an intimate view of a nude Helena modestly wrapping
herself in fur. Rubens’s final Self-Portrait with Helena and Peter
Paul (c. 1639–40) features his youngest son and namesake, born
in 1637. Despite the rejuvenated visage Rubens here gave himself,
death was not far away. After a severe attack of gout, he died in
May 1640 and was buried in the Jacobskerk in Antwerp. His
eventual successor as Flanders’ premier painter was Jacob
Jordaens, van Dyck having died little more than a year after
Rubens himself.

Legacy and influence

The art of Peter Paul Rubens is a fusion of the traditions of
Flemish realism with the Classicizing tendencies of the Italian
Renaissance. Rubens was able to infuse his own astounding
vitality into a powerful and exuberant style that came to epitomize
the Baroque art of the 17th century. The ample, robust, and
opulent figures in his paintings generate a pervasive sense of
movement in vivid, dynamic compositions. Rubens was one of the
most assimilative, versatile, and productive of all Western artists,
and his almost limitless resources of invention enabled him to
become the master of the greatest studio organization in Europe
since that of Raphael in Rome a century before. The larger the
scale of the undertaking, the more congenial it was to his spirit.

The epic quality of Rubens’s art represented only one side of his
multifaceted genius. A celebrated diplomat in his time, he was also
a scholar and humanist, a learned Classicist and antiquarian, a
prodigious correspondent in several languages, and even an
amateur architect. His profound learning enabled him to draw
upon a wellspring of biblical narratives, Roman Catholic theology
and hagiography, and Greek and Roman history and mythology
for the subject matter and iconography of his art. A devout Roman
Catholic, a loyal subject of the Spanish Habsburgs, a devoted
husband, and the father of eight children—this prosperous,
energetic, thoroughly balanced man presents the antithesis of the
modern notion of struggling artist.

Rubens’s profound stylistic influence extended over three

centuries—from van Dyck to the Impressionist painter Pierre-
Auguste Renoir—and ranged far beyond Flanders. In Italy his
influence was decisive on the Baroque painters Pietro da
Cortona and Luca Giordano. In Spain his early impression on the
young Velázquez was later superseded by his pervasive impact
on Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, the most Rubensian of Spanish
painters. At the Royal Academy in France the champions of colour
over line—the Baroque over the Classical—found their model in
Rubens. The advent of the Rococo style, heralded by Antoine
Watteau early in the 18th century, coincided with the triumph of
these Rubenists. Among Rubens’s English beneficiaries
were Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The 19th-
century French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix wrote that
Rubens “carries one beyond the limit scarcely attained by the most
eminent painters; he dominates one, he overpowers one, with all
his liberty and boldness.” Rubens’s recurrent impact on artists was
almost as universal as the talents of the man himself. Painter,
diplomat, impresario, scholar, antiquarian, architect, humanist—
Rubens embodied the Baroque fulfillment of the Renaissance man.