_Rubens_ (Flemish: 1577-1640).
Peter Paul Rubens, born on the festival of Saints Peter and
Paul (hence his Christian name), is the chief glory of the
Flemish School, and one of the great masters of the world. It
is impossible to walk round any gallery where there are good
specimens of his work and not to be impressed at once with his
_power_. Here, one feels, is a strong man, who knew what he
wanted to paint, and was able to paint it. Whatever moral or
poetical feelings he had or had not, he was at any rate master
of the painter's language,[68] and this language is itself "so
difficult and so vast, that the mere possession of it argues
the man is great, and that his works are worth reading." "I
have never spoken," says Ruskin elsewhere, "and I never will
speak of Rubens but with the most reverential feeling; and
whatever imperfections in his art may have resulted from his
unfortunate want of seriousness and incapability of true
passion, his calibre of mind was originally such that I
believe the world may see another Titian and another Raphael,
before it sees another Rubens." Rubens affords, in fact, "the
Northern parallel to the power of the Venetians." Like the
Venetians, too, he is a _great colourist_. The pictures by the
later Northern painters which here hang around his are dark
and gloomy; his are all bright and golden. He is like Paul
Veronese, too, in his "gay grasp of the outside aspects of the
world."[69] His pictures in this Gallery embrace a wide range
of subjects--some peaceful, others tumultuous--some religious,
others profane, but over them all is the same _gay glamour_,
"Alike, to Rubens, came subjects of tumult or tranquillity, of
gaiety or terror; the nether, earthly, and upper world were to
him animated with the same feeling, lighted by the same sun; he
dyed in the same lake of fire the warp of the wedding-garment
or of the winding-sheet; swept into the same delirium the
recklessness of the sensualist and rapture of the anchorite;
saw in tears only their glittering, and in torture only its
flush." A fourth characteristic, which also cannot fail to
be perceived in a general survey of Rubens's pictures in the
Gallery, remains to be noticed. In all his exuberant joyousness
is a strain of _coarseness_, "a want of feeling for grace and
mystery." "There is an absence everywhere of refinement and
delicacy, a preference everywhere for abundant and excessive
types." He would have agreed, one may think, with the saying
of Blake (in the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_), "exuberance
is beauty,"--Madonnas, goddesses, Roman matrons, have all
alike a touch of grossness. Rubens, says Fromentin, "is very
earthy, more earthy than any among the masters whose equal he
is, but the painter comes to the aid of the draughtsman and the
thinker, and sets them free." To like effect Heine speaks of
"the colossal good humour of that Netherlands Titan, the wings
of whose spirit were so strong that they bore him up to the
sun, in spite of the hundredweights of Dutch cheese hanging to
his legs."
It is instructive to notice how the art of Rubens was
characteristic of the circumstances of his life and time. In
the first place, though he travelled in many lands, Rubens
remained to the end a Fleming, every inch of him.[70] "A man
long trained to love the monk's visions of Fra Angelico,
turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of
Rubens which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But
is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that while
Angelico prayed and wept in his _olive shade_, there was
different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders;--wild
seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless
marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the
frosty clay; careful breeding of stout horses and fat cattle;
close setting of brick walls against cold winds and snow;
much hardening of hands and gross stoutening of bodies in
all this; gross jovialities of harvest homes and Christmas
feasts which were to be the reward of it; rough affections,
and sluggish imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod
humanities, but humanities still; humanities which God had
his eye upon, and which won, perhaps, here and there, as much
favour in his sight as the wasted aspects of the whispering
monks of Florence. (Heaven forbid it should not be so, since
the most of us cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and
reapers still.) And are we to suppose there is no nobility in
Rubens's masculine and universal sympathy with all this, and
with his large human rendering of it, Gentleman though he was,
by birth, and feeling, and education, and place; and, when he
chose, lordly in conception also? He had his faults, perhaps
great and lamentable faults, though more those of his time and
his country than his own; he has neither cloister breeding nor
boudoir breeding, and is very unfit to paint either in missals
or annuals; but he has an open sky and wide-world breeding in
him, that we may not be offended with, fit alike for king's
court, knight's camp, or peasant's cottage." It is thus that
Rubens was a child of Flanders. But he was also a child of
the intellectual time in which he lived. He was born at a
time, says Ruskin, when the Reformation had been arrested--his
father, curiously enough, had fled from Antwerp as a Reformer,
but afterwards returned to Catholicism. "The Evangelicals
despised the arts, while the Roman Catholics were effete or
insincere, and could not retain influence over men of strong
reasoning power. The painters could only associate frankly with
men of the world, and themselves became men of the world. Men,
I mean, having no belief in spiritual existences, no interests
or affections beyond the grave. Not but that they still painted
Scriptural subjects. Altarpieces were wanted occasionally,
and pious patrons sometimes commissioned a cabinet Madonna.
But there is just this difference between men of this modern
period and the Florentines or Venetians--that, whereas the
latter never exert themselves fully except on a sacred subject,
the Flemish and Dutch masters are always languid unless they
are profane." Rubens was thus a man of the world. When a
boy he was for some time page in the family of a countess
at Brussels. But his bent towards art was too strong to be
gainsaid. When only twenty-two he was already a master-painter
in the Antwerp Guild. Two years later he went to Italy, and
for eight years he was in the service of the Duke of Mantua.
An excellent Latin scholar, he was also proficient in French,
Italian, English, German, and Dutch. These gifts procured him
diplomatic employment. In 1603 "the Fleming," as they called
him, was sent on a mission to Spain. In 1608 news of his
mother's illness reached him, and he hastened home, when he was
appointed court-painter to the Archduke Albert, then Governor
of the Netherlands. In 1620 he visited Paris, at the invitation
of Mary de' Medici (a sister of the Duchess of Mantua), and
received the commission for the celebrated series of pictures
now in the Louvre, commemorating the marriage of that princess
with Henry IV. of France. In 1628 Rubens was sent on a
mission to Philip IV. of Spain, and made the acquaintance of
Velazquez. The great decorative master and the great realist
(his junior by twenty-two years) painted together, travelled
together, and talked together for eight or nine months. Rubens,
we are told, was never so well pleased as when he was in the
company of Velazquez, and Velazquez showed no resentment at
the commissions given by the court to the foreign painter. In
1629 Rubens was sent to Charles I. of England (_see under_ 46),
by whom, in the following year, he was knighted. He was also
given an honorary degree by the University of Cambridge. On
this occasion, Rubens was commissioned to paint the pictures
which adorn the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall
(now the United Service Institution). Wherever he went Rubens
continued to paint, and his diplomacy he considered as mere
recreation. "The painter Rubens," he is reported to have said
of himself, "amuses himself with being ambassador." "So said
one with whom, but for his own words, we might have thought
that effort had been absorbed in power, and the labour of
his art in its felicity." How hard he laboured is known by
the enormous number of his works which still survive, by the
large fortune he amassed, and by the great request in which
his talents were held. "Whatever work of his I may require,"
wrote a celebrated Antwerp printer, "I have to ask him six
months before, so as that he may think of it at leisure, and do
the work on Sundays or holidays; no week-days of his could I
pretend to get under 100 florins." But of the several thousands
of works ascribed to the master, many were painted from his
sketches by pupils and assistants. "To put it plainly, Rubens
established a picture factory at Antwerp. He was thus enabled
to paint portraits, landscapes, hunting scenes, and pictures
of _genre_, as well as to undertake several series of gigantic
decorations as important as those of Raphael or Michael
Angelo. The master made small, lively sketches of the work to
be done, the pupils laid them in, each doing what suited his
talent, while Rubens reserved to himself the duty of bringing
the picture together; in some cases by using the work beneath
as a ground for almost complete repainting, in most cases by
mainly correcting here and there, or enhancing the effect with
a few brilliant and dexterous touches" (R. A. M. Stevenson's
"_Portfolio_ monograph" on Rubens). Brueghel, Snyders, Teniers,
and Van Dyck were among his assistants. Some of Rubens's
letters contain curious information on his methods. Thus he
offers to Sir Dudley Carleton certain pictures in exchange for
a collection of antique marbles. Among them was to be "'A Last
Judgment,' begun by one of my pupils after an original which I
made of much larger size for the Prince of Neubourg, who paid
me for it 3500 florins in ready money. As the present piece is
not quite finished, I will retouch it altogether by myself, so
that it can pass for an original: 1200 florins."
Rubens was unspoilt by success. Like many other great artists,
he is conspicuous for "a quite curious gentleness and serene
courtesy.... His letters are almost ludicrous in their
unhurried politeness. He was an honourable and entirely
well-intentioned man, earnestly industrious, simple and
temperate in habits of life, highbred, learned, and discreet.
His affection for his mother was great, his generosity to
contemporary artists unfailing." He was twice married. In
1626 his first wife, Isabella Brant, died. Four years later
he married Helena Fourment, a beautiful girl of sixteen, the
living incarnation of his feminine type. "At the time of his
second marriage Rubens was fifty-three years of age. He led
a serious, happy, retired life. His leisure time he devoted
to his family, to a few friends, to his correspondence, his
collections, and his rides." "In the morning," we read, "he
rose very early, and while he painted someone read aloud Livy,
Plutarch, Cicero, Virgil or other poets. Then he would stroll
in his gallery to stimulate his taste by the sight of the works
of art he had brought from Italy. On other occasions he would
study science, in which he always retained an active interest.
Although he lived splendidly, he ate and drank moderately, and
the gout from which he suffered in later life was certainly
undeserved. He painted in the afternoon till towards evening,
when he mounted a horse and rode out of the town." His house
at Antwerp still stands; as also does his country-house, near
Mechlin, of which there is a view in our Gallery (No. 66)
(_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 15, sec.
ii. ch. ii. § 12; vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. i. § 2; vol.
iv. pt. v. ch. i. § 17; vol. v. pt. viii. ch. iv. § 21, pt.
ix. ch. vi. §§ 1-9; _On the Old Road_, i. 185, 186; _Stones of
Venice_, vol. i. App. 15; Wauters, _The Flemish School_, p.
214).
"A miracle of agitation. A flush tide of the richest colour, which
positively seems to boil up in swirling eddies of harmonious form.
Its whole surface is swept by lines which rush each other on like the
rapid successive entrances of an excited _stretto_, till the violent
movement seems to undulate the entire pattern of the picture" (R.
A. M. Stevenson: _Velazquez_, 1899, p. 51). As for the subject, see
for the story of the Sabine women under 644. But the subject in this
case does not greatly matter. "Rubens in one of his most marvellous
pictures, the Rape of the Sabines, which hangs in the National Gallery,
did not even take the trouble to dress his Sabines in the costumes
of their day. Without any more ado he dressed them in the style of
the seventeenth century. One might rather think it a kidnapping of
beautiful Antwerp women on a Flemish fair-day. But what difference does
it make? He has _made_ white shoulders that shine, sumptuous stuffs,
warriors with glittering arms--all which is instinct with life, and
blazes with the deepest colouring of the greatest of Flemish masters.
The colourists have never considered the subject otherwise than as a
means of representing life under such and such actions, or such and
such aspects, joyful or sad, or simply plastic" (Benjamin Constant in
_North American Review_, Nov. 1900).