_Rubens_ (Flemish: 1577-1640). _See_ 38.
Rubens "perhaps furnishes us with the first instances of complete,
unconventional, unaffected landscape. His treatment is healthy, manly,
and rational, not very affectionate, yet often condescending to minute
and multitudinous detail; always, as far as it goes, pure, forcible,
and refreshing, consummate in composition, and marvellous in colour"
(_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 15). Notice
especially the sky. "The whole field of ancient landscape art affords,
as far as we remember, but one instance of any effort whatever to
represent the character of the upper cloud region. That one instance
is the landscape of Rubens in our own Gallery, in which the mottled or
fleecy sky is given with perfect truth and exquisite beauty" (_ibid._,
vol. i. pt. ii. sec. iii. ch. ii. § 9). Rubens's skill in landscape was
partly due to fondness for the scenery he depicted. This picture was
painted when he was at Genoa, but it is a purely Flemish scene--a broad
stretch of his own lowlands, with the castle of Stein, it is said,
which was afterwards his residence, near Mechlin, in the background,
with Flemish waggon and horses fording a brook, and with a sportsman in
the immediate foreground, carrying an old-fashioned firelock, intent on
a covey of partridges.[87] "The Dutch painters are perfectly contented
with their flat fields and pollards; Rubens, though he had seen the
Alps, usually composes his landscapes of a hayfield or two, plenty of
pollards and willows, a distant spire, a Dutch house with a moat about
it, a windmill, and a ditch" (_ibid._, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. xiii. §
20). The Dutch painters agreed, in fact, with the Lincolnshire farmer
in Kingsley's _Alton Locke_, whom Ruskin goes on to quote: "None o'
this here darned ups and downs o' hills, to shake a body's victuals out
of his inwards," but "all so vlat as a barn's vloor, for vorty mile on
end--there's the country to live in!"
This picture is one of four "seasons." (Spring is in the Wallace
collection at Hertford House, Summer and Winter are in the Royal
collection at Windsor.) It was presented to the nation by Sir George
Beaumont. The painter Haydon, describing a visit to Sir George at
Coleorton, writes:
"We dined with the Claude and Rembrandt before us, breakfasted with the
Rubens landscape, and did nothing morning, noon, or night but think
of painting, dream of painting, and wake to paint again." The picture
is referred to also by Wordsworth in a very interesting passage.
"I heard the other day," he writes to Sir George Beaumont, "of two
artists, who thus expressed themselves upon the subject of a scene
among our lakes: 'Plague upon those vile enclosures!' said one; 'they
spoil everything.' 'Oh,' said the other, 'I never _see_ them.' Glover
was the name of this last. Now, for my part, I should not wish to be
either of these gentlemen, but to have in my own mind the power of
turning to advantage, wherever it is possible, every object of Art and
Nature as they appear before me. What a noble instance, as you have
pointed out to me, has Rubens given of this in that picture in your
possession, where he has brought, as it were, a whole country into
one landscape, and made the most formal partitions of cultivation,
hedgerows of pollard willows, conduct the eye into the depths and
distances of his picture: and thus, more than by any other means, has
given it that appearance of immensity which is so striking" (_Memorials
of Coleorton_, ii. 135).