Voluptuous women, muscle-bound men... Rubens was just ahead of his time.
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The Triumph of Henry IV,
c. 1630, Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy the Met
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Rubens was the most important artist of the Flemish Baroque. But it was in his oil sketches that
he was able to kick over convention and go for complete, riotous action. Rubens
made these sketches because he was first and foremost an “idea man.” His busy
workshop designed decorative schemes, tapestries, and altarpieces while churning
out portraits, landscapes and history paintings. Since much of the finish work
was done by someone else, it’s in his oil sketches that we find the ‘true’
Rubens.
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Mercury and a Sleeping Herdsman, 1625-28,
Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery
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These sketches were usually (but not always) in color. They were studies for works in oil or other media. “Nothing reveals more clearly the ways in which his
muscular and agile mind worked than the study of his more intimately scaled
drawings and oil sketches,” wrote
Peter Sutton. “It is the work of art that comes closest to recording the
moment of conception.”
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The Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse, 1623-24, Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy of
the Getty Museum
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The Virgin as the
Woman of the Apocalypse was a sketch for the main altarpiece at Freising
Cathedral. It’s a riot of action. The Virgin Mary holds the Christ Child while
trampling the serpent, who in turn curls around the moon at her feet. To the
left the Archangel Michael and his supporting cast drive out Satan and other
ghoulish demons. Above, God the Father instructs an angel to place a pair of
wings on the Virgin's shoulders. All of this is incredibly complex and would
be tough to fit into a vast altarpiece. It approaches the impossible when you
realize the sketch is only about 20 by 25 inches.
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Head of a Negro, 1618-20,
Peter Paul Rubens, courtesy the Hyde Collection. Rubens often painted stock
heads that he could later insert into his vast history canvases.
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Rubens was the son of a Calvinist attorney from Antwerp. Religious
turmoil caused the family to flee Antwerp for Cologne. There, the elder Rubens
met Anna of Saxony,
wife of William of
Orange, and was hired to reclaim her confiscated fortune from the Duke
of Alba. If you think that sounds like the plot for a novel, it gets worse:
Rubens, senior either had an affair with the princess or he was set up to take
the fall. She was divorced, imprisoned, and died; he did a stretch in chokey
himself.
Returned to Antwerp, the younger Rubens was educated as a
gentleman, which served him in his role as diplomat and
courtier. He apprenticed at age 14, and followed that with the requisite tour
of Italy. Titian, Veronese,
Tintoretto,
and that recent phenomenon, Caravaggio,
all profoundly influenced his later style.
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The Defenders of the Eucharist from The Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series, ca. 1628, Woven by Jan Raes, Jacob Fobert, and Hans Vervoert, after Peter Paul Rubens, wool and silk. Courtesy Convent of the Descalzas Reales, Madrid
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Tapestry cartoons provided a large part of his workshop’s
business. Triumph
of the Eucharist was ordered by Rubens’ friend, the Archduchess Isabella, for the Convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid. It included 16 tapestries
that covered the walls of the Convent’s chapel on feast days.
Rubens wasn’t shy about his own talent. Angling for the job
of designing the ceilings for Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House in Whitehall
Palace, he wrote, “my talent is such that no undertaking, no matter how large
in size, how varied in subject, has ever exceeded my confidence.”
