Peter Paul Rubens: The Complete Story
Peter Paul Rubens ran the biggest painting factory in Europe, spoke six languages, and was knighted by two kings who were at war with each other, for helping end the war. Around 1,400 works carry his name; his own hand priced by the square foot of it.
The word Rubenesque has shrunk him to a body type. The man was the closest thing baroque Europe had to a one-person multinational.
Peter Paul Rubens at a glance:
1577: born in Siegen, Westphalia, in exile: his father's affair with a princess had made Antwerp unsafe.
1600 to 1608: eight Italian years, court painter in Mantua, copying Titian and learning what scale means.
1622: Marie de' Medici orders 24 enormous canvases of her own life; he delivers the cycle in three years.
1630: knighted by Philip IV of Spain and later Charles I of England, for diplomacy conducted between sittings.
1640: dies in Antwerp at 62; his estate sale is a European event with kings among the bidders.
Born in exile, trained for courts
Rubens was born in Siegen, Westphalia, on June 28, 1577, because his lawyer father had fled Antwerp and then been imprisoned for an affair with the Princess of Orange. Back in Antwerp, the boy trained as a page and a painter, absorbed Latin and diplomacy along with drawing, and spent 1600 to 1608 in Italy serving the Duke of Mantua, copying Titian and studying Roman ruins until his mother's illness called him home for good.
The factory of Antwerp
From his palatial house, now the Rubenshuis museum, he organized production on an industrial scale: assistants, among them the young Van Dyck, painted from his oil sketches, specialists supplied animals and flowers, and Rubens finished the crucial passages.
He priced honestly by degree of his own hand, as his surviving letters to buyers show.
The system delivered around 1,400 works, including the 24 canvases of the Marie de Medici cycle for the Luxembourg Palace, painted between 1622 and 1625 and now filling a room of the Louvre.
More incredible painter stories
If Peter Paul Rubens pulled you in, you will love these too:
The painter who ended a war
Fluent in six languages, Rubens doubled as a diplomat for the Spanish Netherlands, and between 1628 and 1630 he shuttled between Madrid and London negotiating the peace between Spain and England.
Philip IV ennobled him; Charles I knighted him and commissioned the Whitehall Banqueting House ceiling, still in place in London. No other painter in history has been decorated by both sides of a war for stopping it.
The myth of the fat ladies
Rubenesque now means one thing, and the reduction misses the argument.
His nudes carry weight because flesh, to him, was life force, painted with a warmth that Renoir and Delacroix studied like scripture; and the same brush produced piercing portraits, storm landscapes, and altarpieces of extreme violence, like the Antwerp Descent from the Cross.
5 million pounds, then the record for any old master, a price paid for fury, not softness.
Helena, the late tenderness, and where to see him
Widowed in 1626, Rubens married the 16-year-old Helena Fourment in 1630, retreated increasingly to his country manor, and painted her with an intimacy, most famously in the fur wrap portrait in Vienna, that anticipates everything private in later art.
He died in Antwerp on May 30, 1640. The Rubenshuis and cathedral in Antwerp, the Louvre's Medici room, the Prado, Vienna, and the Whitehall ceiling in London are the essential stops.
The letters
A few hundred of his letters survive, mostly in Italian, and they read like a savant's: Roman gems, optics, stoic philosophy, fortifications, and only occasionally paint.
His great correspondent was the Provençal scholar Peiresc; they traded antiquities and theories the way other men traded gossip.
A visitor described him painting, dictating a letter and listening to Tacitus read aloud at once. No historian has dared improve the scene.
The house as argument
He built his case in stone: the Rubenshuis, an Italian palazzo grafted onto an Antwerp townhouse, with a portico like a triumphal arch between court and garden.
Inside were his antiquities, a Pantheon-style rotunda for sculpture, and a studio with a gallery from which clients could watch the factory work.
The house declared painting a liberal art and its practitioner a gentleman. Restored as a museum, it still makes the argument to visitors.
The print empire
A parallel business ran in print: engravers under his supervision turned paintings into plates, protected by privileges, early copyrights, obtained in France, the Netherlands and Spain.
It nearly turned dangerous: his chief engraver, Lucas Vorsterman, broke down over credit and control, and friends feared enough for Rubens's safety that protection was arranged.
The prints made the style continental. Painters who never saw an original learned Rubens from paper.
The Peter Paul Rubens questions that keep coming up
Why is Rubens important? He fused Italian grandeur with Flemish realism into the engine of the baroque, and his workshop model shaped how large-scale painting was produced for two centuries.
Did Rubens paint everything himself? No, and he said so: assistants worked from his sketches and he priced works by how much was his own hand. Fully autograph Rubens costs accordingly.
Was Rubens really a diplomat? A serious one: he negotiated between Spain and England in 1628-30, and was knighted by both crowns for the peace that followed.
Where can I see Rubens? The Rubenshuis and the cathedral Descent from the Cross in Antwerp, the Medici cycle at the Louvre, the Prado, Vienna, and the Whitehall ceiling in London.
How much does a Rubens cost? The Massacre of the Innocents brought 49.5 million pounds in 2002, still among the highest prices for any old master.
How many Rubens paintings exist? Around 1,400 works carry his name with varying shares of his hand. The autograph core is smaller, and the arguments about it are eternal.
More secrets to unlock
Knighted by two warring kings
Rubens signed his letters as a working painter even while carrying state secrets between enemy courts, and history returned the compliment: he remains the only artist knighted by two warring kings for diplomacy conducted between sittings.
