Peter Paul Rubens – Flemish Artist
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is a Flemish painter and is considered the most important of the 17th century. As many art historians say:
"He [Rubens] combined the bold brushwork, luminous color, and shimmering light of the Venetian school with the vigor of the art of Michelangelo and the formal dynamism of Hellenistic sculpture, Rubens created a vibrant style, with an energy that emanates from tensions between the intellectual and the emotional, the classical and the romantic." 1
For more than two centuries after his death, his work continued to influence such artists as Jean-Antoine Watteau in the early 18th century and Eugène Delacroix and Pierre Auguste Renoir in the 19th century. 2
Rubens's father, Jan Rubens, was a important lawyer in Antwerp, who converted from Catholicism to Calvinism. In 1568 he left Flanders with his family to escape persecutions against Protestants. Peter Paul was born in exile in Siegen, Westphalia (now in Germany), also the birthplace of his brother Philip and his sister Baldina. In Westphalia, Jan Rubens became the adviser of Princess Anna of Saxony, wife of Prince William I of Orange. 3 When Jan Rubens died in 1587, his widow returned with the children to Antwerp, where she and her family became Catholics. After studying in a Latin school and serving as a page at court, Peter Paul decided to become a painter. He was apprenticed to Tobias Verhaecht, Adam van Noort, and Otto van Veen, called Vaenius, three not very famous Flemish painters. In 1598, at the age of 21, he was given the title of “Master painter of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke”.4
Soon afterwards, Rubens traveled to Italy. In 1605 he served as the duke's emissary to King Philip III of Spain. 5
When his mother died, Peter Paul returned to Antwerp in 1608. He married Isabella Brant the following year.6
Between 1622 and 1630 Rubens’s role as a diplomat for Flanders and Spain was equal to his importance as a painter. In 1622 he visited Paris, where the French queen Marie de Medici commissioned him, for the Luxembourg Palace, to depict her life in a series of allegorical paintings, which he completed in 1625.71
Despite the keen loss Rubens felt after the death of his wife in 1626, he continued to be highly productive. In 1628 he was sent by the Flemish viceroys to Spain.8
While in Madrid, he received several commissions from King Philip IV of Spain, who made him secretary of his Privy Council. Rubens also served as a mentor to the young Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. After a delicate diplomatic mission to London in 1629, Rubens was knighted by King Charles I of England.9
From 1630, when he married Hélène Fourment, until his death, Rubens remained in Antwerp, primarily at Castle Steen, his country residence. During the final decade of his life, he continued to execute commissions for the Habsburg monarchs of Austria and Spain. Increasingly, he also painted pictures of personal interest, especially of his wife and children and of the Flemish countryside.10
According to art historians:
“In his life, Rubens epitomized the extraordinary Baroque ideal of virtuoso of the virtuoso for whom the entire universe is a stage. He was, on the one hand, a devoutly religious person and, on the other, a person of the world who succeeded in every arena by virtue of his character and ability. Rubens resolved the contradictions of the era through humanism that union of faith and learning attacked by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation alike. In his paintings as well, Rubens reconciled seemingly incompatible opposites. His enormous intellect and vitality enabled him to synthesize his sources into a unique style that unites the natural and supernatural, reality and fantasy, learning and spirituality. Thus the epic canvases define the scope and the style of High Baroque painting”. 11
