Part 2

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 any work that was remunerative. Rubens realised that if he could but turn their gifts to the best advantage they would at least be as valuable to him as he could be to them. Consequently he responded to the suggestions that were made to him on every side, and gathered the cleverest unattached men of his city to the studio, giving each one his work to do. Let us place to his credit the fact that there was no disguise about this procedure, it was open and unabashed. Rubens would even send pupils to start a work that had been commissioned, and would not appear on the scene until the first outline of the picture was on the canvas. Then he would come along and with a few unerring strokes correct or supplement the composition, to which his pupils could pay their further attentions. Rubens received high prices for his work, but would give his name to a picture in return for a comparatively low fee, if the purchaser would but be content to have his design and leave the painting to pupils. It may be said that Rubens was always fortunate in his selection of assistants, just as he was fortunate in other affairs of life. The great Vandyck was among those who worked in his studio, Snyders the celebrated animal painter was another; it is said that Rubens never touched his work.

Like the Florentine painters of the Renaissance, Rubens was by no means satisfied to devote himself entirely to paint. He had been greatly impressed during his sojourn in Italy by the extraordinary beauty of the palaces of Genoa--a beauty, be it added, that charms us no less to-day when time has added its priceless gifts to the architects' design. Rubens published a book on the Genoese palaces, with something between fifty and one hundred drawings of his own, most carefully made. He found time to make illustrations for the famous Plantin Press, to which we have referred already. He superintended the work of engraving his own pictures, and in short showed himself a man competent to grasp more than the common burden of interests, and to deal with them all with a rare intelligence coupled with sound business instinct. Although the painter's education had not been great, he had acquired scholarship at a time when classical education was considered of the very highest value, and no man who lacked it could claim to be regarded as a gentleman. He maintained correspondence with friends in the great cities of Europe, and as he had great personal attractions and a perfect charm of manner with which to support his industry and achievements, there is small need to wonder at his progress. Success would indeed have been a fickle jade had she refused to surrender to such wooing.

IV

THE LATER YEARS

When the painter had passed his fortieth year he received a commission from the Dowager Queen Maria de Medici to paint certain panels for her palace in Paris, and in order to see them properly placed and to get a comprehensive idea of the scheme of decoration, he betook himself with the first part of his finished work to the French capital. There is no doubt that Rubens was already regarded in the governing circles of Antwerp as something more than a painter. His relations with the ruling house had brought him into touch with diplomatic developments--he had handled one or two with extreme tact, delicacy, and success. The Infanta Isabel relied upon him in seasons of emergency, and although the political value of his first visit to Paris in 1623 cannot be gauged, it is fairly safe to assume that his second visit to the capital two years later was far more concerned with politics than paint. To put before the reader a brief story of the complications of the political situation between France, Spain, and the Low Countries would make impossible demands upon strictly limited space, but those who wish to understand something of the politics of his time may be referred to the works of Emile Michel and Max Rooses on Peter Paul Rubens and his time. They will find there far more historical and biographical matter than can be referred to in this place. 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 one gift that the gods denied him was poetic fancy, a quality that would have kept him from the portrayal of types and incidents that we are apt to regard, with or without justification, as ugly, that would have made his classicism pleasing to eyes that read it at its true value. But Rubens was one of the men who have to fight, not against failure but against success; and the shrewd practical nature that made him what he was served as an effective barrier against acquisition of the qualities that would have lifted him to the region that always remained just beyond his reach.

1628 was a very interesting year in the painter's life, for he was sent on a mission to the Court of Spain, where he met Velazquez, who was instructed to show him all the art treasures of the capital. What would we not give to-day for an authentic account of the conversations that these men must have held together? Rubens was at the zenith of his fame, if not of his achievement, Velazquez was unknown save in Seville and Madrid, and was fighting against every class of disadvantage on the road to belated recognition. Let those who sneer at Rubens and can find no good about him, remember that he it was who turned Velazquez' attention to Italy. Rubens found time to paint portraits of several members of the royal family, and these works are fine likenesses enough, though they do not pretend to rival Velazquez' achievements in the same field. The diplomatic business was conducted with so much skill that Philip entrusted his visitor with a mission to Paris and London. In the last-named city Rubens was received by Charles I., who conferred a knighthood upon him, and approved of his commission to decorate the banqueting-chamber at Whitehall.

Back again in Antwerp, Rubens found his talents sorely tried by the diplomatic developments in which the restless ambition of Maria de Medici involved all the countries subject directly or indirectly to her influence. He found himself compelled to go twice to Holland in the early thirties, but the death of the Infanta Isabel in 1633 removed him awhile from the heated arena of politics. Rubens prepared Antwerp for the visit of the Archduke Ferdinand, the Spanish governor, the city being decorated for this occasion at a cost of 80,000 florins. The work was so successful that the Archduke paid a special visit of congratulation to the artist, who was laid up in his room by an attack of gout. Two or three years later, some warnings that his strength would not hold out much longer availed to turn Rubens from the life of Courts and capitals, and he purchased for himself the Château de Stein, a very beautiful estate that is preserved for us by the delightful picture in the National Gallery. There he settled down for awhile to fulfil certain commissions for the King of Spain, and doubtless had he been permitted to remain in retirement his health would have been the better and his life the longer. But Antwerp could not dispense with the services of her painter-diplomat, and many a time when he would have been in his studio working at his ease, some urgent message from the city would drag him away. In the winter of 1639 he passed some months in Antwerp, working as best he could in the intervals of severe attacks of gout. The King of Spain's commission was still unfinished, and some feeling that he himself would never be able to complete it led Rubens to engage a larger number of assistants than usual, and to content himself with directing their efforts and supplementing them as occasion arose. He seems to have known that death was near, for he made his will and prepared to meet the end. It came with May in 1640, when the painter was in the sixty-fourth year of a brilliant and useful life.

Rubens was twice married, first to Isabel Brandt, who became his wife when she was eighteen and he was thirty-two, shortly after his return to Antwerp from the service of the Duke of Mantua. 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.

V

THE PAINTER'S ART

Turning from a survey of Rubens' life to a consideration of his art, the three divisions to which his work groups itself naturally, are very clearly seen. Up to the time of his marriage with Isabel Brandt his work may be referred to the first division, and in art it may be said that no man's earliest pictures are of much consequence save for their promise of higher things. 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. Rubens was never a slavish imitator, he never assumed the mantles of the men he admired, as so many great painters have done. Goya, for example, was a man whose range of thought and capacity for receiving impressions were so great that he has painted after the manner of half-a-dozen masters, and there are pictures to be seen in Madrid to-day that are painted with Goya's brush and recall Fragonard. Such instances may be multiplied, and Rubens is to be admired for the restraint that marked this side of his early work.

From the time of his marriage down to the season when he became recognised on all sides as a diplomatist, let us say roughly from 1610 to 1626, we get the second period, and to this may be referred the greater part of the work that has given offence--the presentation of the coarsest types of men and women in a state of nature--the treatment of some of the grossest incidents in mythological stories in fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination.

We are justified in asking ourselves whether the extraordinary development of the painter's social and political life did not avail to arrest in late middle age any tendencies he might otherwise have had to express still further the coarser side of classical subjects. By the time he reached the forties, Rubens was the companion and even the trusted counsellor of princes and rulers. Such refinement as Western Europe boasted was to be met in the circles he frequented. The greatest work of the greatest masters was within his reach, and he had travelled to the point at which a man is able to select as well as to admire, at which he can distinguish clearly between the points that make for a picture's strength and those that detract from it.

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. The wistful purity of a Bellini Madonna, the exquisite loveliness of a Bellini child or cherub, left him unmoved, but a Titian or a Tintoretto at its biggest, if not at its best, pleased him, and when he came in Rome to the works of Raphael and Michel Angelo he would seem to have looked no further for inspiration. Doubtless he heard many interesting theories of art in Rome, where, as we have said, Caravaggio, who wielded considerable influence in the art world, was among his friends. But Rubens thought out things for himself, and learned to quell his own instincts and to subdue his own faults as they were revealed to him.

Violence is perhaps the characteristic of Rubens' early work. 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 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. It is the enthusiasm of clever youth, the youth of a man in whose veins there is enough and to spare of very healthy blood, in whose mental equipment refinement has been overlooked.

The death of his mother, the distressful plight of his favourite city, the responsibility of his commissions, his marriage and the fruits of his Italian travel brought about the second period, and started the traditions that give Antwerp a school and a name in the history of European art. 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 chiaroscuro 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. Perhaps the dominant impression that these works leave is one of certain difficulties created to be overcome. Just as the painter in his first manner revelled in his strength, so in his second period he rejoices in his skill. It was left to the later years to weld strength and skill into the service, on pictures that could stand for both and emphasise neither. Mythology continued to hold him, indeed we must never forget that Rubens lived in the age of pseudo-classicism, and is to be counted among its victims. To his second period belongs such work as the disgusting "Procession of Silenus" now in Munich, a picture in which the grossness of the theme is only rivalled by the vulgarity of the treatment. Some of Rubens' apologists have held that this class of work was painted as a protest against vice, but such apologies are far-fetched. Rubens needs no apologist. Consider his work as a whole, and what is good dwarfs what is bad. Doubtless, had he been able in the later days to re-possess and destroy some of his more tainted pictures, he would have done so. It will be remarked by all who know Rubens' work intimately, that throughout his life he was happier with a Venus than a Madonna, more at home with some great classical figure, than with the picture of Christ. He did not respond to Christianity in the sense that the Venetians responded to it, he could not for all his reputation have painted a Madonna as Bellini did, and there is no reason to believe that he would have cared to do so. Then again we may not forget that Rubens the artist, and Rubens the courtier, and Rubens the special envoy, were closely associated with Rubens the man of business, who would always have painted for choice the work likely to find immediate acceptance. There were times when some legend of Saint or Martyr moved him strangely, and he turned to it with a measure of inspiration not often excelled by the greatest of the Renaissance artists; but these occasions were rare, although Antwerp preserves one of the most effective results of such inspiration in the "Last Communion of St. Francis." 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.

When he became recognised as a diplomatist whose services were required by Europe's greatest potentates, Rubens had passed the meridian of life. He had known prosperity from the very earliest days, he had no occasion to paint pictures of the sort so admirably summed up by the offensive word "pot-boiler." Kings and Queens and Emperors were offering him commissions, he was, if we may say so, on his best behaviour. He rose to the height of every great occasion. The commission that Maria de Medici gave him for her palace seems to have brought him to his third and latest manner, and from that year until death overtook him Rubens was one of the great masters of European art. If we could eliminate all the pictures of his first manner and a considerable portion of those belonging to his middle period, his claims would hardly be denied by the representatives and supporters of any school. 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 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 Château of Stein in our National Gallery and the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection gives sufficient evidence of this, while such a work as the Garden of Venus in the Prado suggests the limitations that were with him throughout his life. It is fair to say that in the later years they were not expressed so prominently in his work.

Finally we have to consider and acknowledge his triumphs as a colourist. It may be said that Rubens, for all his gifts, required more than twenty years of unremitting labour to obtain his mastery over colour, but when once it was his he retained the gift to the last hour. In the early days Rubens as a colourist was a person of no importance, the grossness of his composition and the tameness of his drawing were not redeemed by the handling of pigment. In the second period the use of paint is far more skilled, but it does not blend, neither does it glow. In the later years it acquires both gifts, and the exquisitely luminous quality of some of his pictures, the marvellous delicacy of flesh tint, that must have astonished and delighted his patrons, is preserved to us to-day. In fact it may be said that Rubens has preserved his colour to a larger extent than many great painters who came after him. He is far more reliable in this aspect of his art than is our own Sir Joshua, whose portraits have long ceased to tell the story they must have told to delighted and flattered sitters. It was no effort of genius that made Rubens a supreme colourist in the later years. He came to his kingdom by dint of sheer hard work, but for his painstaking devotion to labours such results could not have been achieved.

The spirit of the Renaissance travelled very slowly from Italy to the Netherlands, and that its influence was felt in the sixteenth century did not lead to any very marked divergence from the traditions that the art of the Netherlands was following. Italian form and Italian sentiment met with little response there, and there is no doubt that the eighty years of conflict with Spain which led to the recognition of the Republic, turned men's thoughts away from art. By the time it was possible to revive a school, the Netherlands were looking to life rather than to faith, and even the classicism of the period that turned Rubens towards pictures illustrating mythological incidents could not help him to create imaginary figures. This is as it should have been, for it made eighteenth-century art what it was through the influence of Rubens and Vandyck. He filled his canvas with the types he saw around him, and while nobody will dispute the virtue of the Netherlands, there will be few found to assert that it produced the Latin type of womanhood. 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 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. Among the painters who worked for Rubens or were greatly influenced by him the best known are Anthony Vandyck, Frans Snyders, Abraham Janssens, Jacob Jordaens, and Jan Van Den Hoecke. Then again, of course, it must not be forgotten that he exercised a very great influence upon David Teniers, and that he served the interests of art development far more than he could have done by giving fresh life to an art form that had served its time and purpose.