S. L. Bensusan

“ Suffice it to say that from 1625 Rubens must be regarded as a diplomatist quite as much as a painter, but curiously enough the development of the political side of his life did nothing to destroy the quality of his painting. In fact he seems to have travelled along the road of diplomacy to his best and latest manner, to have seen life more clearly, and the problems of his art more intelligently than before, to have brought to his work something of the quality that we call genius. ”

“ The third period, which saw the painting of the great works that hang in Antwerp’s Cathedral and Museum to-day, and is represented in our own National Gallery and Wallace Collection, was the best of all. Passing from his labours as he did at a comparatively early age, for Rubens was but sixty-three when he died, he did not suffer the slow decline of powers that has so often accompanied men who reached their greatest achievements in ripe middle age and shrink to mere shadows of a name. ”

“ He has the grand manner without the grand method, his contrasts of light and shade and even of colour amuse where they do not offend, and his drawing is by no means remarkable or inspired. At best it is correct. We feel that we cannot see the wood because of the trees, that the blending has not been sufficiently skilful to bring about proportion and harmony, and that the expression of a [Pg 62] giant form with prize-fighter’s muscles in the foreground of a canvas is sufficient to fill the painter with a delight that enables him happily to ignore the rest. ”

“ There may have been seasons when he elected to attempt more than any man could hope to achieve. There were times when he set himself to work deliberately to express certain scenes, romantic or mythological, in a fashion that must have startled his contemporaries and gives offence to-day; but to do justice to the painter, we must consider his work as a whole, we must set the best against the worst. ”

“ Many a Renaissance Madonna enshrined on canvas for the adoration of the devout could remove the least suspicion of sanctity from herself, if she did but raise her downcast eyes or smile, as doubtless she smiled in the studio wherein she was immortalised. For the artist sees a vision beyond the sitter, and [Pg 20] under his brush the sanctification or profanation of a type are matters of simple and rapid accomplishment. If another Rubens were to arise to-day, he could find sitters in plenty who would respond to the treatment that his prototype has made familiar. ”

“ Perhaps we may trace to all the mental disturbance of this era the artist’s first great transition, for the Rubens who painted in Antwerp after his return from Italy and gave the “Descent from the [Pg 41] Cross” to his city, is quite a different man from the one who painted the earlier pictures. He has matured and developed, has completed the period of assimilation through which all creative artists must pass, has gathered from the talents, from the genius of the men he has studied, the material for founding a style of his own. He begins to speak with his own voice. ”

“ Rubens on arriving in Italy in the days when he had first taken service under the Duke of Mantua, was doubtless unduly impressed by Michel Angelo and Raphael. On no other grounds can we account for the delight that his earliest pictures manifest in the portrayal of massive and even ugly limbs. Doubtless he was influenced too by Titian, though we cannot agree that it was his admiration for the master that made him copy the King’s Titians in the Prado, for it is more probable that on this occasion he simply obeyed instructions. Moreover, Rome appealed to him more than Venice did. ”

“ Rubens painting the portrait of wife or brother or friend, and Rubens [Pg 77] covering vast canvases with glittering and sometimes meretricious work are two different men. We may admire the latter, but we come near to intimate appreciation of the former. In the portraits the man is revealed, in the big pictures we see no more than artist, and some of us fail to realise how clever he is, how many problems of composition and tone and light and shade he has grappled with and overcome in manner well-nigh heroic. ”

“ Our Wallace Collection has a delightful portrait of Isabel Brandt, and the National Gallery holds the portrait of Suzanne Fourment, “Le Chapeau de Paille,” while Amsterdam and other cities hold portraits of his second wife, the famous portrait of Gervatius is to be seen in Antwerp, and there are several delightful examples of his portraiture in Brussels. It was in these schools of art that Rubens has succeeded in pleasing many who turn with feelings not far removed from disgust from his unshrinking studies of the coarse overblown or overgrown womanhood. ”

“ It is impossible to found an opinion not likely to be shaken, upon the work to be seen in London or in Paris, where the Louvre holds many of the painter’s least attractive works. It may be said that Peter Paul Rubens is represented in every gallery of importance throughout Europe, that the number of his acknowledged works runs into four figures, and that there are very few without some definite and attractive aspect of treatment and composition that goes far to atone [Pg 18] for the occasional shortcomings of taste. For his generation Rubens sufficed amply. ”

“ He seems to have received added inspiration from his child wife, and there are few more delightful pictures than one to be seen in Munich in which Rubens and Helena Fourment are walking from their garden to their château. Perhaps even in the later days woman was nothing more than a thing of beauty for a [Pg 68] man’s delight, and man was no more than a godlike animal, but a well-defined measure of refinement was always beyond their painter’s mental or artistic conceptions. It is sufficient for us that the appeal of nature came to him with great strength. ”

“ The people of the Netherlands do not belong to the Latin races; that is why they did not respond earlier to the Renaissance, that is why they look at what seems to be their worst rather than their best in some of Rubens’ most ambitious works. Yet by reason of his long sojourn and hard study in Italy, Rubens did do [Pg 74] something considerable to bring Italian art and tradition into the Netherlands, and if he could not establish it there, the cause of failure was that the genius of the country was opposed to it. ”

“ He did not reach his supreme mastery of colour until he had lived for half a century or more, and the pictures that have the greatest blots upon them from the point of view of the twentieth century, were painted before he reached the summit of his powers. It is perhaps unfortunate that Rubens painted far too many works to admit of a truly representative collection in any city or gallery. The best are widely scattered; some are in the Prado in Madrid, others are in Belgium, some are in Florence. ”

“ He felt the human interest attaching to them, and this human interest brought to his canvas certain qualities that belong to the heart rather than the head, and have given them a claim that is not disputed even by the painter’s most severe critics. ”

“ It may be remarked in this place that to see Rubens at his best, one must not go to the National Gallery or to the Louvre or to the Prado—Antwerp and Vienna hold some of the finest examples of his second and third manner. And we must never forget that Art is concerned with treatment, and that subject is of secondary interest to artists. ”

“ The violence passes slowly from the canvases, the straining after effect that is so obvious and often so unpleasing in the earlier pictures goes with it. The chiaro [Pg 63] scuro is more subdued and consequently more pleasing, only in the handling of colour the painter is still clumsy and heavy. Rubens, the great colourist, seems to have been born when the artist was more than forty years old.
Some of the best work of the second period is in Antwerp and Brussels, but it is to be found scattered all over Europe, and there are examples in private collections in this country. ”

“ A portrait of the two sons this wife bore him may be seen in Vienna. Isabel Brandt did not live to see her boys, Albert and Nicholas, grow to manhood. She died in 1626, some say from the plague that swept Antwerp in that year. Four years later the painter married the beautiful Helena Fourment, when he was fifty-four and she was sixteen, and she survived him. He seems to have been a good and affectionate husband and father. In fact, it is hard to find among the biographers of Rubens anybody who speaks ill of the artist as a man. ”

“ Consider the vast range of achievements [Pg 16] that embraced landscape, portraiture, and decorative work, giving to every subject such quality of workmanship and skill in composition, as none save a very few of the world’s great masters have been able to convey to canvas. And let it be remembered, too, that Rubens was not only a painter, he was a statesman and a diplomat ”

“ They were popular subjects for effective treatment, pictures that would make a sure appeal to those who loved either the sacred or the profane in art, pictures to be executed with all possible skill at the greatest possible speed, and with a measure of assistance regulated by the price that was to be paid for them. ”

“ It is well that Rubens’ industry was on a par with his talents, for commissions poured in upon him in the first years of his return from Italy. They came not singly but in battalions, and very soon we find Peter Paul Rubens following the fashion of his time and establishing a studio school. Naturally enough there were plenty of young men who wished to become his pupils, and plenty of old ones who had just missed distinction and were anxious for [Pg 42] any work that was remunerative. ”

“ It will be seen that the grouping of the children results in every possible difficulty that an artist may have to face, but that Rubens has encountered them all with sure, hard, and steady eye, in fashion worthy of Tintoretto himself. ”

“ The offence of certain pictures is increased by the fact that, when Rubens painted them, he had not attained to the supreme mastership over colour, and inspiration of composition, that came to him in later life. But in a brief review of the artist’s life and work enough has been told of the aspects upon which his detractors love to dilate. ”

“ They do little more than mark his progress, record impressions he has received from strong personalities, and mark his own path through the influences of different schools and varied appeals, to the complete expression of himself. ”

“ This picture was probably painted in Italy. The man sitting behind the table with an open book before him is Justus Lipsius the philosopher. To his left is one of his pupils, and on the right we see Philip Rubens, pen in hand, and Peter Paul himself standing up against a red curtain. ”