The Pride Of Flanders

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The tact of the courtier, as well as the splendid powers of the painter, may be seen of a famous Rubens at the National Gallery, ‘The Blessings of Peace,’ which shows Minerva, goddess of Wisdom, pushing back War, while Peace receives Wealth and Happiness and their smiling children. This picture was presented to the English kind by Rubens soon after his arrival in London as a delicate hint of the advantages to be derived from concluding peace with Spain.

It is said that while he was painting this picture in London an English courtier asked Rubens, ‘Does the Ambassador of his Catholic Majesty amuse himself with painting?’ ‘No,’ replied Rubens, ‘I amuse myself sometimes with being an ambassador.’

On February 21, 1630, Charles I knighted the painter, and soon afterwards Sir Peter Paul Rubens returned to the Continent and again settled in Antwerp. Isabella Brant had been dead about four years, and in December Rubens married Helen Fourment, whom he must have known from childhood. She was one of the seven daughters of Daniel Fourment, a widower, who had married the sister of Ruben’s first wife. Helen was only sixteen when she married.

The last seven years of his life were devoted by Rubens to domestic happiness and his art rather than to politics, which he practically abandoned after 1633. He had a fine country estate near Malines, the Château de Steen, of which we may see a picture in the National Gallery, and there for the most part he lived quietly, happy with his girl-wife and only troubled by attacks of gout. During these last years Rubens produced a quantity of fine pictures; in one year (1638), for example, he dispatched a cargo of 112 pictures by himself and his pupils to the King of Spain. The rapidity of the master’s execution is well illustrated by a story that, having received a repeat order from Philip (after he had received the 112 pictures), and being pressed by the monarch’s brother Ferdinand to deliver the new pictures as quickly as possible, Rubens said he would do them all with his own hand ‘to gain time’.

Among these new pictures, sent off in February 1639, were the ‘The Judgment of Paris’ and ‘The Three Graces,’ both now at the Prado, and generally held to be the finest as well as the latest of the painter’s many pictures of these subjects. But still the King of Spain wanted more pictures by Rubens. Further commissions arrived, and in May 1640 the great master died in harness, working almost to the last on four large canvases.

Excelling in every branch of painting, and prolific in production, Rubens is a master of whose art only a brief summary can be given. A final word, however, must be said on the landscapes which form a conspicuous feature among his later works, and of which we possess so splendid an example in ‘The Rainbow Landscape’ in the Wallace Collection. The healthy and contented sense of physical well-being, which radiates from every landscape by Rubens, has been expressed in a criticism of this picture by Dr Richard Muther: ‘The struggle of the elements is past, everything glitters with moisture, and the trees rejoice like fat children who have just had their breakfast.’

It has been said that there are landscapes which soothe and calm our spirits, and landscapes which exhilarate. Those by Rubens come under the latter category. He was no mystic in his attitude towards Nature; he approached her without awe, with the friendly arrogance of a strong man who respects strength. Most of his landscapes were painted in the neighborhood of his country seat, and in them we may trace not only the painter’s love of the beauty in Nature, but something also of the landowner’s pride in a handsome and well-ordered estate.

The heir of the great Venetians in his painted decorations, Rubens was a pioneer in all other directions. His portraits were the inspiration of Van Dyck and the English painters of the eighteenth century, his landscapes were the prelude to Hobbema and the ‘natural painters’ of England and Holland; while in pictures like ‘Le Jardin ď Amour’ and ‘The Dance of Villagers’ he invented a new style of pastoral with small figures which Watteau and other later artists delightfully exploited.

The Pride Of Flanders (continued)