Part 3

Rubens the landscape painter, the painter of religious and mythological subjects, has rather obscured Rubens the portrait painter, and this is not as it should be, for many will be inclined to agree that it is as a portrait painter that Rubens was often at his best. Visitors to Florence will not forget the portrait group entitled "The Philosophers," that may be seen in the Pitti Palace. 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. He contrived either to confer a measure of dignity upon his sitters or to conserve one. His portraits of his two wives, and the portrait group in the Pitti Palace that introduces his brother, are full of a deep feeling for which we may look in vain to many of his larger canvases. Just as the pianist or violinist will turn from playing some wonderful concerto bristling with difficulties for the soloist and calculated to delight the ears of the groundlings, and then taking up some simple piece by a great master will infuse into it all the qualities that the showy concerto hid, so Rubens turned from the wars and loves of gods and goddesses, from Bacchic carnivals and groups in which nudity is insisted upon sometimes at the expense of relevance, and would paint portraits that will be a delight as long as they remain with us. Rubens painting the portrait of wife or brother or friend, and Rubens 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.

The secret of his changing moods is of course beyond us, but perhaps one may hazard an explanation for the difference in the quality of the work done. As far as we can see from a study of the painter's work and life, he approached mythology and Christianity from a purely pictorial standpoint, and did not believe in one or the other. "The Procession to Calvary," "The Crucifixion," "The Descent from the Cross," "The Flight into Egypt," "The Adoration of the Magi," "The Draught of Fishes," "The Raising of the Cross," "The Assumption of the Virgin," "The Last Supper," "The Circumcision," "The Flagellation," and the rest, were no more and no less to him as subjects than "The Drunken Hercules" or "The Battle of the Amazons," "The Garden of Venus" or "The Judgment of Paris." 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. But the portraits of his friends, of the brother he loved, and of the wives to whom he was a devoted husband, stood on quite a different plane. 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.

The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London

The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh