Chapter 13
The remarkable freedom and originality of Rubens's treatment of classical subjects is thus accounted for. Under the surface is his familiarity with the antique, but instead of carrying this above ground, he builds on it a palace in accordance with the times and circumstances in which he lived. The principles of classical art underlie the modern structure. Among his numerous works of classical mythology the picture at Munich of _Castor and Pollux_ carrying off the daughters of Leucippus is worthy of being first mentioned. The Dioscuri mounted on spirited steeds, one of which is wildly rearing, are in the act of capturing the two damsels. The calm expression of strength in the male, and the violent but fruitless resistance of the female figures, form a striking contrast. Although the former are merely represented as two coarse and powerful men, and the women have only common and rather redundant forms and Flemish faces, yet the picture produces as a whole such a striking effect, owing to the admirable manner in which the subject is conceived, the power of imagination which it displays, and the exquisite colouring and tone, that it would never occur to any unprejudiced spectator to regret the absence of antique forms and character.
Two other pictures of this class are singled out for description by Waagen as masterpieces. One is the _Rape of Proserpine_, at Blenheim,--Pluto in his car, drawn by fiery brown steeds, is carrying off the goddess, who is struggling in his arms. The other is the _Battle of the Amazons_, in the Munich Gallery, which was painted by Rubens for Van der Geest. With great judgment he has chosen the moment when the Amazons are driven back by the Greeks over the river Thermodon: the battle takes place upon a bridge, and thus the horror of the scene is carried to the highest pitch.
Both in Flanders and in Italy Rubens had been brought into close contact with all the magnificence and splendour which belonged to those gorgeous times, and he delighted in representing the pomp of worldly state and everything connected with it. Of all sacred subjects none afforded such a rich field for display as the _Adoration of the Kings_; he has painted this subject no less than twelve times, and his fancy appears quite inexhaustible in the invention of the rich offerings of the eastern sages. Among the subjects of a secular character the history of Marie de'Medici, the triumph of the Emperor Charles V., and the Sultan at the head of his Army, gave him abundant opportunities of portraying Oriental and European pageantry, with rich arms and regalia, and all the pomp and circumstance of war. Profusion--pouring forth of abundance, that was one of Rubens's most salient characteristics. Exuberance, plenty, fatness.
As a painter of animals, again, Rubens opened out a new field for the energy of his fellow-countrymen, which was tilled so industriously by Frans Snyders and Jan Fyt, and in a lesser degree by the Dutchmen Jan Weenix, father and son, and Hondecoeter. That the naïve instincts, agility, and vivacity of animals must have had a great attraction for Rubens is easily understood. Those which are remarkable for their courage, strength, intelligence, swiftness--as lions, tigers, wild boars, wolves, horses, dogs--particularly interested him. He paid special attention to animals, seized every opportunity of studying them from nature, and attained the most wonderful skill and facility in painting them. It is related that he had a remarkably fine and powerful lion brought to his house in order to study him in every variety of attitude, and that on one occasion observing him yawn, he was so pleased with the action that he wished to paint it. He therefore desired the keeper to tickle the animal under the chin to make him repeatedly open his jaws: at length the lion became savage at this treatment, and cast such furious glances at his keeper, that Rubens attended to his warning and had the beast removed. The keeper is said to have been torn to pieces by the lion shortly afterwards: apparently the animal had never forgotten the affront put upon him.
By such means--though it is to be hoped not always with such lamentable results--Rubens succeeded in seizing and portraying the peculiar character and instinct of animals--their quick movements and manifestations of strength--with such perfect truth and energy that not one among the modern painters has approached him in this respect--certainly not Landseer, as Mrs Jameson would ask us to believe.
The celebrated _Wolf Hunt_, in the collection of Lord Ashburton, was one of the earliest, painted in 1612 for the Spanish General Legranes only three years after Rubens's return from Italy. In this picture, his bold creative fancy and dramatic turn of mind are remarkably conspicuous--even at this early stage in his career. Catherine Brant, his first wife, on a brown horse, with a falcon in her hand, is near her husband; a second huntsman on horseback, three on foot, another old wolf and three young ones, with several dogs, complete the composition, which is most carefully painted in a clear and powerful tone throughout.
Of scenes of peasant life, one of his earliest, and yet the most famous, is the _Kermesse_, which is now in the Louvre. A boisterous, merry party of about seventy persons are assembled in front of a country ale-house; several are wildly dancing in a circle, others are drinking and shouting; others, again, are making love.
_The Garden of Love_, equally famous, was one of Rubens's latest pictures. Of this there are several versions in existence, of which those at Dresden and Madrid may be considered as originals. Several loving couples in familiar conversation are lingering before the entrance of a grotto, the front of which is ornamented with a rustic portico. Amongst them we recognise the portraits of Rubens and his second wife, his pupil Van Dyck, and Simon de Vos.
As Rubens united to such great and various knowledge the disposition to communicate it to others in the most friendly and candid manner, it was natural that young painters of talent who were admitted into his atelier should soon attain a high degree of skill and cultivation.
At "the House in the Wood," not far from the Hague, there is a salon decorated entirely by the pupils of Rubens. The principal picture, which is one of the largest oil paintings in the world, is by Jacob Jordaens, and represents the triumph of Prince Frederick Henry--the object of the whole scheme being the glorification of the House of Orange, in 1649. Most of the other pictures are of Theodore van Thulden, who in these works has emulated his illustrious master in the force and brilliance of his colouring.
But it is not in any particular salon or palace that we must look for the effects of Rubens' influence; it was far wider than to be able to be contained within four walls. In portraiture he gave us Van Dyck; in historical subjects, Jacob Jordaens; in animal painting and still life, Frans Snyders, Jan Fyt, and the brothers Weenix. In pictures of everyday life he gave us Adrian Brouwer and David Teniers; in landscape, Everdingen, Ruisdael and Waterloo. "Thus was the art of painting in the Netherlands remodelled in every department," says Waagen in the concluding sentence of his memoir, "by the energies of a single great and gifted mind. Thus was Rubens the originator of its second great epoch, to which we are indebted for such numerous and masterly performances in every branch of the art."
III
THE PUPILS OF RUBENS
DAVID TENIERS the elder, who was born at Antwerp in 1582, received the first rudiments of his art from Rubens, who soon perceived in him the happy advances towards excelling in his profession that raised him to the head of his school. The prejudice in favour of his son, David Teniers the younger, is so great that the father is generally esteemed but a middling painter; and his pictures not worth the inquiry of a collector. His hand is so little distinguished, however, that the paintings of the father are often taken for those of the son. The father was certainly the inventor of the manner, which the son, who was his pupil, only improved with what little was wanting to perfection.
Rubens was astonished at his early success, and though he followed the manner of Adrian Brouwer, looked on him as his most deserving pupil by the brightness of genius that he showed. He soon saved enough money to undertake the journey to Italy, and when at Rome he established himself with Adam Elsheimer, who was then in great vogue. In Elsheimer's manner he soon became a perfect master, without neglecting at the same time the study of other and greater masters, endeavouring to penetrate into the deepest mysteries of their practice. An abode of ten years in Italy, and the influence of Elsheimer combined with that of Rubens, formed him into what he became.
When he returned to his own country he employed himself entirely in painting small pictures filled with figures of people drinking and merry-making, and numbers of peasants and country women. He displayed so much taste in these that the demand for them was universal. Even Rubens thought them an ornament to his collection.
Teniers drew his own character in his pictures, and in the subjects he usually expressed everything tends to joy and pleasure. Always employed in copying after nature whatsoever presented itself, he taught his two sons, David and Abraham, to follow his example, and accustomed them to paint nothing but from that infallible model, by which means they both became excellent painters. These were his only disciples, and he died at Antwerp in 1649.
The only distinction between his works and those of his son, David Teniers the younger, is that in the latter you discover a finer touch, a fresher brush, a greater choice of attitudes, and a better disposition of the figures. The father, too, retained something of the tone of Italy in his colouring, which was stronger than his son's; but his pictures have less harmony and union--though to tell the truth, when the father took pains to finish his picture, he very nearly resembled his son.
The latter, DAVID TENIERS the younger, was born in 1610. He was nicknamed the Ape of painting, from his powers of imitation. The Archduke Leopold William made him a gentleman of his bedchamber, and he made copies of all his pictures. He came to England to buy several Italian pictures for Count Fuensaldegna, who on his return heaped favours upon him. Don John of Austria and the King of Spain set so great a value upon his pictures that they built a gallery set apart to preserve them--there are no less than fifty-two in the Prado Gallery to-day.
His principal talent was landscape adorned with small figures. He painted men drinking and smoking, alchemists, corps de garde, temptations of S. Anthony, and country fairs and merry-makings. His small pictures are superior to his large ones. His execution displays the greatest ease; the leafing of his trees is light, his skies are admirable: his small figures have an exquisite expression and a most lively touch, and the characters are marked out with the greatest truth. From the thinness of the colours his works seem to have been finished at once; they are generally clear in all their parts, and Teniers had the art, without dark shades, to relieve his lights by other lights, so well managed as to produce the effect he wanted, an art which few besides himself have attained. He died at Antwerp in 1694.
FRANS SNYDERS was born at Antwerp in the year 1587, ten years later, that is to say, than Rubens. He received his first instruction in the art of painting from Henry van Balen. His genius at first displayed itself only in painting fruit. He afterwards attempted animals, in which kind of study he succeeded so well that he surpassed all that had ever excelled before him. He stayed for some time in Italy, and the works he met with there by Castiglione proved a spur to his genius to attempt outdoing him in painting animals. When he returned to Flanders he fixed his ordinary abode at Brussels, where he was made painter to the Archduke and Duchess, and became attached to the house of Spain. Twenty-two of his pictures are in the Prado Gallery.
When Snyders required large figures in his compositions both Rubens and Jordaens took pleasure in assisting him, and Rubens in turn borrowed the assistance of Snyders to paint the ground of his pictures; thus they mutually assisted each other in their labours, while Snyders' manly and vigorous manner was quite able to hold its own even when joined with that of the great master.
ANTHONY VAN DYCK was born at Antwerp in 1599, less than three months before Velasquez at Seville. Both became so famous in their capacity of Court painters that the rest of their achievement is popularly regarded as little more than a bye-product.
In the case of Van Dyck there is the more excuse for the English public, inasmuch as, like Holbein before him, he was exclusively employed while in this country in the production of portraits; and as "his works are so frequent in England," as Horace Walpole observes in the opening sentence of his memoir in the "Anecdotes of Painting," "that the generality of our people can scarce avoid thinking him their countryman," it is easy enough to forget that he only spent the last nine years of his life here.
Again, the insatiable craze of the English and American public for portraits has helped to obscure the extent of Van Dyck's capabilities in other directions, and while the National Gallery contains not a single subject-piece from his hand, more and more thousands are continually spent in the acquisition of more and more portraits. The bewitching _Cupid and Psyche_ in Queen Mary's closet at Hampton Court, painted a year before his death, is scarcely known to exist!
At the same time it would be useless to deny that Van Dyck's principal claim to his place among the greatest masters rests chiefly upon portraiture. The point I wish to make is that portrait painting never yet made a great master, but that none but a great master ever became a great portrait painter; and so long as we are only permitted to see the particular achievement of the artist in our public galleries, so long is it likely that we shall continue to be flooded with mediocre likenesses of fashionable people by painters whose highest or whose only achievement they constitute. Anyone can write a "short story" for the cheaper sort of modern journal; only writers like Hardy, Stevenson, or Kipling can give us a masterpiece in little.
It was said that Rubens advised Van Dyck to devote himself to portraiture out of jealousy: but that is hardly in accordance with what we know of his generous nature. If the advice was given at all we may be sure that it was given in a friendly spirit. But there was something in the temperament of Van Dyck which peculiarly fitted him for the Court, apart from any question as to his excellence in any particular branch of his art, and it is evident that the personality of Rubens, and his connection with the rich and mighty of the earth, influenced him almost as much as did his art. How much he owed to Rubens, and how much Rubens owed to him in painting is a matter that is arguable. He had been several years with Van Balen before he entered the studio of Rubens, when eighteen years old, not as a pupil but as an assistant. Here he not only had the practical task of painting Rubens's compositions for him, in company with numerous others, but had also the advantage of studying the works of Titian and other of the great Italian masters in Rubens's famous collection. If the hand of Van Dyck is traceable in some of the pictures of Rubens at this period, so the spirit of Rubens is very obvious in those of Van Dyck. The chief thing to be remembered is that in these early days he was not painting portraits. His earliest works, in which the influence of Titian is perceptible as well as that of Rubens, are the _Christ bearing the Cross_, in S. Paul's at Antwerp, painted in 1618; the _S. Sebastian_ at Munich, and the _Christ Mocked_, at Berlin. The familiar portrait of _Cornelius van der Geest_ in the National Gallery, is one of his very earliest, probably before 1620. Again, on his first visit to Genoa, in 1621, on the advice of Rubens, his ambition was not to paint portraits, as on his second visit some years later, but to rival Rubens in the composition of great historical pieces. It was not until 1627, when he left behind him in Genoa the superb series of Balbi, Brignole-Sala, Cattaneo, and Lomellini portraits, and returned to Antwerp to undertake those such as the _Le Roys_ at Hertford House, or the _Beatrice de Cusance_ at Windsor, that he had really become a portrait painter. Even then, he was still determined not to yield to Rubens at Antwerp, and painted, amongst other subjects, the _Rinaldo and Armida_ for Charles I. It was only at the solicitation of George Geldorp, a schemer as well as a painter, that he consented at length, in 1632, to come to England; and it was only the welcome afforded to him by Charles that induced him to settle here.
Two considerations of personal vanity may be suggested as actuating Charles to be specially indulgent to Van Dyck--an indulgence of which the results posterity should not omit to credit to the sad account of the martyr--first, that his father had failed to retain the painter in his service, and second, that Velasquez, who had made a sketch of him on his mad visit to Madrid in 1623, was then immortalising Philip. Velasquez being out of the question, why not Van Dyck! An excellent idea! Especially when instead of dwarfs, buffoons, and idiots, the English Court contained some exceedingly fine material besides the royal family for the artist to exercise his talent upon.
After this, Flanders knew Van Dyck no more, save for a year or two's sojourn from 1633-1635 when he painted one or two magnificent portraits, and then returned to England, where he died in 1641. With the death of Rubens the year before, Flemish painting had suffered another eclipse; and though Snyders lived till 1657, and Jordaens and the younger Teniers continued till late in the century, no fresh seedlings appeared, and the soil again became barren. Rubens and Van Dyck were both too big for the little garden--their growth overspread Europe.
_DUTCH SCHOOL_
I
Frans Hals
Meantime we must turn our attention to Holland, where FRANS HALS, who was born only three years later than Rubens, namely in 1580, was the forerunner of Rembrandt, Van der Helst, Bol, Lely, and a host more of greater or less painters, who made their country as famous in the seventeenth century for art as their fathers had made it in the sixteenth for arms. Without going into the complications of the political history of the Netherlands at this period, it is important nevertheless to remember that while the Flemish provinces remained Catholic under Spain, the northern states, after heroic struggles, formed themselves into a Republic; so that while it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between what was Dutch and what was Flemish in estimating the influence of one particular painter upon another, there is no question at all as to vital difference between the conditions which led to the production of the pictures of the two schools. The Flemish pictures were for the Church and for the Court, the Dutch for the house, the Guildhall, or the bourgeoisie. The former were aristocratic, the latter democratic. Rubens and Van Dyck were aristocrats, Hals and Rembrandt democrats. Rubens painted altar-pieces, for the great churches or cathedrals or for the chapels of his patrons. Rembrandt painted Bible stories for whoever would purchase them. Van Dyck painted the portraits of kings and nobles. Hals painted the rough soldiers and sailors, singly, or in the great groups into which they formed themselves as Guilds. For the first time in the history of painting, neither Church nor Court were its patrons.
In any age or under any circumstances Frans Hals would have seemed a remarkable painter, but to measure his extraordinary genius to its full height we must try to realise what those times and those circumstances were. In Florence and Venice, as we have seen, there were great schools of painting, and in Florence especially, the whole city existed in an atmosphere of art. There was no escape from it. In Haarlem, where Hals spent his youth (he was born in Antwerp), there was no such state of affairs. There were no chapels to be decorated, no courtiers to be flattered. The country was seething with the effects of war, and the whole population were ready for it again at a moment's notice. There were plenty of heroes--every man was one--but not of the romantic sort. They were all bluff, hardy fellows, who wanted to get on with their business. Who would have thought that they wanted to have their portraits painted? And who, accordingly, could have induced them to do so except a bluff, roystering genius like Hals, who slashed them down on canvas before they had time to stop him? Once it got wind that Hals was such a good fellow, and that he dashed off a portrait to the life in as little time as it took to pass the time of day with him, he had plenty of business, and from painting single portraits he was commissioned to glorify the Guilds by depicting their banquets, which he did with almost as much speed and considerably more fidelity than the limelight man at a City dinner in these times. His first great group--_The Archers of S. George_, at Haarlem--has all the appearance of being painted instantaneously as the banqueters stood around the table before dispersing.
When we think of the cultured Rubens, brought up in the atmosphere of Courts, and studying for years among the finest paintings and painters in Italy, and compare him with this low, ignorant fellow, who had never been outside the Netherlands, do we not find his genius still more amazing? Nowadays we see a portrait by Hals surrounded with the finest works of the greatest painters in all times and in all lands, and see how well it stands the comparison. But our admiration must be increased a hundredfold, when we know that he was without any of the training or tradition of a great artist, and that it must have been by sheer character and genius alone that he forced his art upon his commercial, though heroic public.
One thing especially it is interesting to notice about the Dutch portraits of the early Republican period, namely, that they are obviously inspired by the pleasure of having a living, speaking likeness rather than by pride and ostentation. Bluff and swaggering as some of Hals's portraits of men appear to be--notably _The Laughing Cavalier_, at Hertford House--that is only because the subjects were bluff and swaggering fellows--swaggering, that is to say, in the consciousness of their ability and their readiness to defend their country and their homes again, if need be, against the tyrant. But these swaggerers are the exception, and the prevailing impression conveyed is that of honest, if determined, bluffness. They are not posing, these jolly Dutchmen, they are sitting or standing, for Hals to paint them just as they would sit or stand to be measured for a suit of clothes. Look at the heads of the man and the woman in the National Gallery. Could anything be more natural and unassuming? Look at the _Laughing Cavalier_, and ask if it is not the man himself, as Hals saw and knew him, not a faked up hero? Hals caught him in his best clothes, that is all. He did not put them on to be painted in--he was out on a jaunt. Look at Hals's women, how pleased they are to be painted, just as they are.