Peter Paul Rubens

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Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 – May 30, 1640) was the most popular and prolific Flemish and European painter of the 17th century. He was the proponent of an exuberant Baroque style which emphasized movement, color, and sensuality.

Biography

Rubens was born in Siegen, Westphalia, to a successful Protestant lawyer who had fled Antwerp to escape religious persecution. In 1589, two years after his father's death, Rubens and his mother returned to Antwerp, where he had himself baptized a Catholic. Religion figured prominently in much of his later work. In Antwerp, his mother apprenticed Rubens to leading painters of the time like Adam Van Noort and Otto Venius.

In 1600 he went to Venice, Italy, where he worked as a court painter to the duke of Mantua, Vincenzo I of Gonzaga. He studied ancient Roman art and learned by copying the works of the Italian masters. His mature style was profoundly influenced by Titian.

In 1603 and 1604, he worked as a diplomat in Spain, combining art and diplomacy as he would throughout his career.

Upon the death of his mother in 1608, Rubens returned to Antwerp. A year later he married Isabella Brant, daughter of Jan Brant, a leading Antwerp humanist. He was appointed court painter by Albert and Isabella, the governors of the Low Countries.

He moved in 1610 to the Rubenshuis, a house in Antwerp that he designed for himself and which is now a museum. This house also contained his workshop where he and his apprentices made most of the paintings, his art collection, and his library, which was one of the most extensive in Antwerp. Rubens was a good friend and occasional collaborator of the Moretus family, owners of the large Plantin-Moretus publishing house.

His altarpieces The Raising of the Cross (1610) and The Descent of the Cross (1611–1614) for the Cathedral of Our Lady established Rubens as Flanders' leading painter.

He received numerous commissions from the French court, including a series of allegorical paintings on the life of Marie de' Medici (now in the Louvre). He and his workshop executed many monumental religious paintings, such as the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of Antwerp. The young Anthony van Dyck was one of the assistants in Rubens' studio.

In the period between 1621 and 1630, the Spanish Habsburg rulers entrusted Rubens with a number of diplomatic missions. Charles I of England knighted him for his diplomatic efforts to bring about a peace treaty between England and Spain. He was also commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Banqueting House at the Palace of Whitehall.

In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Hélène Fourment. Rubens had three children with Isabella and five with Hélène; his youngest child was born eight months after his death. Hélène's charms recur in later works such as The Garden of Love, The Three Graces and The Judgment of Paris, painted for the Spanish court and now in the Prado.

Rubens died of gout at age 63 and was interred in Saint Jacob's church, Antwerp.

Art

As many of his paintings feature full-figured, voluptuous women, the word "Rubenesque" (meaning plump or fleshy, yet not "fat," and used exclusively to describe women) is derived from his last name.[1]

Still, his art was much more diverse than this. He painted numerous portraits and self-portraits, religious paintings, as well as landscapes and historical pieces. He designed tapestries and houses.

Workshop

Rubens' paintings can be divided into three categories: those he painted himself, those which he painted in part (mainly hands and faces), and those he only supervised. He had, as was usual at the time, a large workshop with many apprentices, some of whom became famous in their own right. The best known of these was Anthony Van Dyck. He also collaborated on some pieces with other, more specialized painters, like Jan Brueghel or Frans Snyders.

Painting for peace

The Allegory of Peace and War [2] (1629), in the National Gallery, London, illustrates his strong concern for peace. It was given to Charles I and helped to create a peace treaty between London and Madrid. He visited the Netherlands, which was "enemy territory," partly to meet Dutch artists and partly to seek political reconciliation. There he encountered the attitude that courtiers should not use their hands in any art or trade. But because he was such a fine artist, Philip IV and Charles I both enjoyed his company as well as his art.

Value

At a Sotheby's auction on July 10, 2002, Rubens' newly discovered painting Massacre of the Innocents sold for £49.5million ($76.2 million) to Lord Thomson. It is a current record for an Old Master painting.

Recently in 2006, however, another lost masterpiece by Rubens, The Calydonian Boar Hunt, dating to 1611 or 1612, was sold to the Getty Collection in Paris for an unknown amount. It had been mistakenly attributed to a follower of Rubens for centuries until art experts authenticated it.[3] [4]

Bibliography

• Alpers, Svetlana, The Making of Rubens. New Haven 1995.
• Heinen, Ulrich, Rubens zwischen Predigt und Kunst. Weimar 1996.
• Belkin, Kristin Lohse, Rubens. London 1998.
• Büttner, Nils, Herr P. P. Rubens. Göttingen 2006.
• Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonne of the Work of Peter Paul Rubens Based on the Material Assembled by the Late Dr. Ludwig Burchard in Twenty-Seven Parts, Edited by the Nationaal Centrum Voor de Plastische Kunsten Van de XVI en de XVII EEUW.

See also

• List of Flemish painters

External links

• National Gallery: Rubens
• The Guardian: Rubens
• At the exhibition Drawings by Peter Paul Rubens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) of New-York 115 drawings of Pieter-Paul Rubens were on display in April 2005. http://www.metmuseum.org/
• The Allegory of Peace and War
• The Virgin and Child with St Elizabeth and the Child Baptist 1630-35
• Rubenshuis in Antwerp, Belgium is the former house of Rubens, now converted into a museum.