RKD STUDIES

Siegen, Westphalia, 28 June 1577–Antwerp, 30 May 1640
Flemish painter, draughtsman, collector and diplomat

Peter Paul Rubens* [1] is the most famous of the Flemish painters of the 17th century, and was the most influential, He was born in Siegen (Westphalia), as the son of the Protestant lawyer Jan Rubens, who had left Antwerp to escape religious persecution. In 1589, two years after Jan Rubens’s death, the family returned to Antwerp and re-converted to Catholicism. From 1591 Rubens began to study under a number of teachers: Tobias Verhaecht (1561–1631), Adam van Noort (1561/2–1641) and Otto van Veen or Vaenius (1556–1629), and in 1598 he registered as an independent master at the Antwerp Guild.¹ Like his teacher Van Veen, he dedicated himself to humanistic studies: he read Classical literature in Latin and Greek;² later he read and wrote in Italian and other foreign languages. In 1600 he left the Spanish Netherlands for Italy, where he would remain for eight years, studying the art of Antiquity and of his Italian contemporaries and predecessors in the collection of the Duke of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga I (1562–1612), and in the churches and cloisters in and around Venice, especially Titian (1488/90–1576), Tintoretto (1518/19–94) and Paolo Veronese (1528–88).³ Unlike most other Northern artists in Italy, Rubens was able to establish himself as a large-scale history painter and also produced two altarpieces for churches in Rome. In 1608 there was one for Santa Maria in Vallicella, the Chiesa Nuova, still present there (the first version is now in Grenoble; see under DPG40A–B). The saints on its wings are related to the ones on the outer wings of the later Antwerp altarpiece The Raising of the Cross. In Rome he studied Classical sculpture and the works of Raphael (1483–1520) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) in the Vatican and in churches and palaces. In 1603 he was sent by the Duke of Mantua to Spain on a diplomatic mission. In 1605–6 Rubens was in Genoa, where he made portraits for the local aristocracy [2]. His brother Philip, a scholar and antiquary, lived for a while in Rome, when Peter Paul was there as well [3].

1
Peter Paul Rubens
Self-portrait of Rubens (1577-1640), dated 1623
Windsor (England), private collection Royal Collection - Windsor Castle

Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608. In 1609 he was appointed court painter to Archduke Albrecht VII of Austria (1559–1621) and Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain (1566–1633). This left him free to accept commissions from other clients, and it also meant that he could have pupils independently of the guild rules.⁴ In the same year he married Isabella Brant (1591–1626) [4], daughter of the humanist and Antwerp city official Jan Brant. Between 1609 and 1621 Rubens received numerous public commissions, including two triptychs for Antwerp churches – The Raising of the Cross (DPG40A and DPG40B are the modelli for its outer wings) and The Descent from the Cross – and tapestries with the story of Decius Mus (1616–18). Ceiling paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp of 1620 comprised 39 scenes of the Old and New Testament and scenes from the lives of the saints; they were destroyed by fire in 1718, and are now known from his many preparatory oil sketches (e.g. DPG125) and by copies made by later artists, including the Dutchman Jacob de Wit (1695–1754). The scenes are all seen di sotto in su, for which he was inspired by the many ceiling compositions by Venetian painters that he had seen in Italy.⁵ In 1622–5 Rubens produced a cycle on the life of Maria de’ Medici (1575–1642) (now in the Louvre), which he followed with a series of tapestries on the Triumph of the Eucharist (1625–7) for Archduchess Isabella. In 1625 in Paris he met George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628; see under DPG143). In 1626 Isabella Brant died and Rubens turned increasingly to diplomatic work. At the same time, however, he continued to produce large-scale decorative cycles – for Charles I of England (1600–1649) the ceilings of the Banqueting House (1629–34) in commemoration of James I of England (1566–1625) [5], and for Philip IV of Spain (1605–65) the Torre de la Parada (1636–8) and designs for the Joyous Entry (1635) of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria (1609–41) – all of which were completed in the 1630s. In 1630 Rubens married Hélène Fourment (1614–73) [6], and she would be his model and muse for the remaining ten years of his life.

He concurrently produced innumerable portraits and historical, mythological and religious scenes, which led him to establish a large studio of assistants to cope with the demand for his work.⁶ In general Rubens made the initial design for an altarpiece or other project in the form of one or more drawings, a grisaille on panel and then a coloured modello or oil sketch, also usually on panel, to show the customer. He then worked out the individual figures in drawings made after life models. (These preparatory creations have not always survived.) After that the pupils and assistants in the workshop took over. At the end Rubens examined and corrected their work. He had learned this way of working from the Venetian painters. There was a difference in price between works entirely by Rubens and those to which the studio had contributed.⁷

Rubens collaborated with other masters, including the animal painter Frans Snijders (1579–1657), the landscape painter Jan Wildens (1584/6–1653) and the flower painter Jan Brueghel I (Velvet Brueghel, 1568–1625): they added animals, landscapes and still lifes to his pictures, and sometimes Rubens contributed figures to their work.⁸ Some of Rubens’s studio stock has survived, and is preserved under the name of ‘Rubens’s Cantoor’ – literally ‘Rubens’s Cupboard’ – in the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) in Copenhagen.⁹ Of the more than five hundred drawings there some are by Rubens himself, but most of them seem to be copies after Rubens’s compositions. Many of those were made by Willem Panneels (1590/1610–34). He was not Rubens’s best pupil, but was a dependable person, who could safely be left in charge of the studio and its holdings when Rubens went away to Spain and London (1628–30). It seems that the stock of drawings was organized by subject (for instance the drawings of animals were kept together),¹⁰ just as contemporary collectors and artists arranged their prints and drawings. From those drawings (and from other sources, including the inventory made after Rubens’s death) it becomes clear that compositions were varied, and that more than one version was frequently made, often with small differences (see for instance under DPG451). That makes the reconstruction of provenances of Rubens’s pictures rather tricky, since the same subject was often treated several times by Rubens and his studio, even on the same scale.

Interestingly, not only painters worked in Rubens’s studio: there were also sculptors, including the German Georg Petel (1601/2–34) who worked in ivory (see under DPG264) [7], and the Fleming Lucas Faydherbe (1617–97).¹¹ According to Scholten, Rubens was interested in the community of the arts: painting, sculpture and architecture.¹² Gerard van Opstal (1605–68) seems to have used models by Rubens for his decorative pieces in ivory (DPG264, Related works, nos 22a–c), but apparently after Rubens’s death.¹³ Rubens even wrote a treatise in Latin, De imitation [antiquarum] statuarum (On the imitation of [Antique] statues), that was published later in a French translation by Roger de Piles (1708).¹⁴

Rubens studied not only Italian art and Antique sculpture but also early Swiss and German masters, including Hans Holbein II (1497/8–1543) and Tobias Stimmer (1538–84; see Van Dyck DPG127, Related works, no. 4c), and early Flemish painters in his own collection. He possessed Antique statues and cameos, modern sculpture and other three-dimensional objects, pictures by 16th-century and contemporary painters (including Adriaen Brouwer (1603/5–38; see there), and drawings.¹⁵ Rubens corresponded about his collection, for instance with the French intellectual and collector Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637).¹⁶ In many cases he ‘improved’, or at least retouched, older drawings.¹⁷ That seems shocking to modern art lovers, just as Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) during his trip to the Netherlands in 1781 was appalled when he realized how Rubens had unashamedly plundered the work of his predecessors.¹⁸ Rubens also ‘plundered’ his own work: we often see the same motif appear in completely different compositions: naked male bodies change from Christ into Prometheus or Adonis and back, female bodies can be used naked as the Three Graces, as the three goddesses who are being judged by Paris (Juno, Venus and Minerva), or clothed in a burgher composition.

Rubens was knighted by both Philip IV (1624) and Charles I (1630), the latter during the farewell audience in London when Rubens was supposed to have presented to the King the famous Minerva protects Pax from Mars (Peace and War), now in the National Gallery, London (see under DPG285, Related works, no. 2b) [8]. In the years 1618–21 he redesigned his house in Antwerp (now the Rubenshuis), based on palazzi in Genoa, about which Rubens published a book with many engravings in 1622.¹⁹ In 1635 he acquired the Château de Steen, known from several landscape pictures by him (for instance in the National Gallery, NG66) [9]. Both the Rubenshuis and this château underlined his status as a member of the landed gentry. In the painted decoration of his Antwerp house Rubens included celebrated paintings from Antiquity, presented as examples of his work.²⁰

Many prints were published after Rubens’s compositions, which contributed to his fame all over Europe. Some were made by members of the Galle family, and some by Lucas Vorsterman I (1595/6–1674/5), Paulus Pontius I (1603–58), and the brothers Bolswert and Christoffel Jegher (1596–1652/3). Rubens attached great importance to these reproductions; he obtained a privilege entitling him to publish them in the Northern and Southern Netherlands. Drawings for the prints were made by the engravers, but sometimes Rubens corrected or retouched them (see DPG403, Related works, no. 3b). He himself probably made only one print [10].²¹ In 1612 he visited Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) in Haarlem, accompanied by the Antwerp painters Jan Brueghel I and Hendrik van Balen I (1573–1632). Goltzius was a master engraver and one of Rubens’s artistic inspirations. It is suggested that he caused Rubens to arrange the production of prints after his work under Rubens’s own supervision, as was the case in Goltzius’s own studio.²²

The prints were valued highly by later connoisseurs and scholars. Before œuvre catalogues of Rubens’s paintings were compiled in the 19th century, catalogues of prints after Rubens were published by Hecquet (1751), Basan (1767) and Voorhelm Schneevoogt (1873) – the latter still useful.²³

Rubens had a major influence on British artists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sir Joshua Reynolds has been mentioned as visiting the Netherlands in 1781; later, John Constable (1776–1837) was inspired by Rubens’s landscapes.²⁴

In the Desenfans and Bourgeois drawing room in the winter of 1790–91 there were four pictures by Rubens (at least according to the inventory published at the time in the Evening Mail). Of those four three have since left the collection: ‘The Conversion of St. Paul, a composition of five figures’, ‘The Fathers of the Church, a composition of six figures’, and ‘A Reposo, a composition of four figures’.²⁵ Only ‘Samson betrayed by Dalila, a composition of ten figures’ (now Anthony van Dyck, DPG127) is still in the collection. In the Desenfans and Bourgeois home no room was dedicated to Rubens, whereas there were rooms for Berchem, Cuyp, Teniers, and Vernet. The inventory made by Britton in 1813 lists nineteen pictures by Rubens, but at that time there were only two rooms dedicated to individual artists (if no changes had been made after Bourgeois’ death in 1811): the Library displayed the pictures by Cuyp, and most of the Poussins were hanging in the Dining Room. The nineteen pictures that are now regarded as Rubens or related to him were acquired after the publication of the inventory in 1790–91, and after the last sale of the Desenfans collection in 1802. We can however spot small clusters in the Bourgeois home: in the Small Parlour there were four pictures then considered to be by Rubens: Romulus (DPG19), the small landscape (DPG218; now after Rubens), the sketch for the Blessed Ignatius in Genoa (DPG148), and Cupids reaping (DPG450; now after Rubens). In the Drawing Room there were five pictures considered to be by the master: four of them were Venus and Cupid warming Themselves (DPG165; now follower of Rubens), St Barbara (DPG125), Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia (DPG43), and the modello with four saints for the outer wings of the altarpiece in the church of St Walburga in Antwerp (now DPG40A–B, but until the 1940s one picture).²⁶ Also in the room was Samson & Delilah (DPG127; now Van Dyck); at the time, and as late as 1900, this large picture was considered by many Rubens and Van Dyck scholars to be by Rubens. In the 19th century the œuvres of the two most important Flemish 17th-century masters were not clearly distinguished, or at least 21st-century scholars see their characteristics differently.

Of the pictures in the Dulwich Picture Gallery that were at some point called Rubens one comes from the Cartwright bequest in 1686 (DPG506); of the nineteen from the Desenfans and Bourgeois collections one is now just a copy after Titian (DPG198), one is by Jan Thomas (DPG123), one has since 1980 been called Cornelis de Vos (DPG290), and one is attributed to Anthony van Dyck (DPG127); later in the 19th and 20th century two copies were added (DPG403 and DPG630). Here nineteen pictures will be discussed.

Interestingly, in Amsterdam in 1817 after long deliberations in a meeting of the Royal Institute of Arts and Sciences Rubens was chosen above Rembrandt (1606/7–69) as a hero of whom a bust should be made for that Institute.²⁷ He was considered to be the better history painter of the two. The Northern and Southern Netherlands were at the time (1815–30) one country, but at the meeting only members from Amsterdam were present. Rubens was later selected to become a symbol of the new Belgian state founded in 1830, after the Belgian Revolution in that year, and a statue was erected in 1840.

There were pages about the life of Rubens in the usual collections of artists’ biographies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first biography dedicated to Rubens was by J. F. M. Michel, published in 1771 in Brussels. It was followed by the first œuvre catalogue of his pictures in 1830. That was in the second volume of the nine published by the London art dealer John Smith, who discussed 1,368 paintings and three addenda; in the supplement of 1842, the ninth volume of the series, 418 more works were considered. A transcript of the inventory made after Rubens’s death was republished in Muller 1989 and Belkin & Healy 2004. Max Rooses in 1886–92 has 1,593 pictures, but they include pictures known only from archival and published sources. Jaffé in his œuvre catalogue of 1989 offers 1,403 pictures – all existing. Held published overviews of the drawings (1959) and the oil sketches (1980). Rubens’s letters were published in the original language by Rooses & Ruelens in six volumes (1887–1909) and in English by Magurn (1955).

Volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard began to be published in 1968, based on material left by that scholar, kept in the Rubenianum in Antwerp.²⁸ Burchard wrote the entries for the Rubens and Van Dyck pictures for the Dulwich exhibition held at Leeds and then at the National Gallery in 1947–53 and for the Dulwich catalogue of 1953.

Curiously, in the early 19th century Waagen (who also made a strange judgement about the Rembrandt pictures at Dulwich) only mentioned Hagar (that he took to be Magdalen) and the large landscape DPG132 (now Follower of Peter Paul Rubens). Passavant also singled out that landscape.²⁹ Perhaps it looked better in the 19th century?

Richter & Sparkes in their catalogue (1880) were over-cautious, and removed several DPG pictures from Rubens’s œuvre (DPG40A–B, DPG148 and DPG19). In this they were followed by 20th-century DPG cataloguers until Burchard, but Rubens scholars including Rooses, Glück, Oldenbourg and Grossmann never doubted those works. After Dr Hell’s restoration project in the 1940s–60s Jaffé, Müller Hofstede and other Rubens scholars gave them back to Rubens.

Dulwich Picture Gallery is especially rich in modelli. They show that Rubens kept busy changing his compositions. Where a modello was followed slavishly one should be suspicious: Rubens seems never to have been satisfied. He would even rearrange the pieces of wood that formed the support for his sketches and paintings (see DPG264).³⁰ Apparently in the 19th century the modelli were not considered to be suitable study material for young artists: at least they were not chosen by the Royal Academy schools to be copied.³¹ That happened only with two large pictures – the ‘Mother of Rubens’ (DPG290; since 1980 Cornelis de Vos; lent to the RA in 1846 and 1883) and Mars, Venus and Cupid (DPG285; lent in 1816, 1831, 1837, 1840, 1851, 1877). The latter is a somewhat surprising choice, since it was considered by some to be indecent, and it even made judicial history. Not until the 20th century was there interest in the more sketchy quality of DPG131 (as Hagar in the Wilderness, lent to the RA in 1902, 1922 and 1930).

Sir George Scharf (1820–95), who became Secretary of the National Portrait Gallery in 1857 and later its Director, on one of his many tours around the British Isles sketched some of the portraits in the Dulwich Gallery. In 1859 he drew three paintings that were thought to be by Rubens – DPG285, DPG290 (since 1980 Cornelis de Vos) and DPG143, the portrait of Katherine Manners (?).

LITERATURE (selective)
Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 1968– (for instance Martin 1968a; Vlieghe 1972–3; D’Hulst & Vandenven 1989; McGrath 1997; Judson 2000; Wood 2010a–b, 2011; McGrath 2016; Büttner 2018a, 2019); Martin 1970, pp. 105–233; Vlieghe 1977a; Held 1980; White 1987; Garff & De la Fuente Pedersen 1988; Jaffé 1989; Muller 1989; Sutton & Wieseman 1993; Kockelberg & Huvenne 1993; Vlieghe 1996f; Belkin & Healy 2004; Schröder & Widauer 2004; Sutton & Wieseman 2004; Rubens 2004; Kräftner, Seipel & Trnek 2005; Van der Stighelen 2006a; Vander Auwera, Van Sprang & Rossi-Schrimpf 2007; Martin 2011; Ducos 2013; Lammertse & Vergara 2018; Büttner 2018b; Ecartico, no. 6423: http://www.vondel.humanities.uva.nl/ecartico/persons/6423 (July 1, 2019); RKDartists&, no. 68737: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/68737 (July 1, 2019).[

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Peter Paul Rubens
Self-portrait with his first wife Isabella Brant (1591-1626), 1609-1610
Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv./cat.nr. 334

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and studio of Peter Paul Rubens Peter Paul Rubens
The Wise Rule of King James I, c. 1633-1634
Whitehall (Westminster), Banqueting House

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Peter Paul Rubens
Family portrait of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Helena Fourment (1614-1673) and Frans Rubens (1633-1678), c. 1635
New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv./cat.nr. 1981.238

7
Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of the sculptor Georg Petel from Augsburg (?-1635), to be dated 1628
Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv./cat.nr. 406

8
Peter Paul Rubens
The blessings of peace (Peace and War), c. 1629-1630
London (England), National Gallery (London), inv./cat.nr. NG46

9
Peter Paul Rubens
Landscape with 'Het Steen' at Elewijt, c. 1635
London (England), National Gallery (London), inv./cat.nr. NG66

10
Peter Paul Rubens
Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1620 dated
New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv./cat.nr. 22.67.3

* Compared with the printed version in the 2016 catalogue, especially here in the Rubens entries, there are some differences in the text. Some are corrections of errors (see below). Sometimes different opinions are expressed, chiefly because new publications have appeared or because new works of art have emerged; these are are not indicated.
Errors in the 2016 catalogue:
p. 183 (Circumcision in Genoa) ‘for the same chapel’ = ‘for the high altar of the same church’
p. 183 (portrait of Pallavicini) ‘in 1607’ = ‘in 1604’
p. 183 (Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary) ‘1607’ = ‘c. 1601’
p. 187 ‘Dioscorus is shown [by Christian Benjamin Müller] with a bare foot’ = ‘Dioscorus is shown with a boot and trousers’
pp. 188–9 (Figs 16 and 17): the captions were transposed, so the drawing on p. 188 (fig. 16) is by Jacob de Wit and the drawing on p. 189 (fig. 17) is by Christian Benjamin Müller
p. 192 (in the caption of Fig. 19) ‘Peter Paul Rubens’ = ‘Follower of Rubens, Jan Boeckhorst (?)’
p. 199 (second column, first line) ‘Tellus’ = ‘Cupid in DPG295’
p. 199 (second column) ‘Ara Pacis’ = ‘Ara Pacis Museum’.