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The Elevation of the Cross
The Elevation of the Cross. Peter Paul Rubens · Public domain · source

Peter Paul Rubens

Public domain1577-1640·Flemish·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Siegen, in Nassau-Dillenburg, on 28 June 1577; he died in Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands, on 30 May 1640. In Antwerp he built up a studio of students and assistants and worked with specialists such as Frans Snyders and Jan Brueghel the Elder; his most famous pupil was the young Anthony van Dyck. He was also a diplomat, ennobled by Philip IV of Spain in 1624 and knighted by Charles I of England in 1630.

Why they matter

He is Flemish Baroque painting: altarpieces, mythologies, hunts and portraits of huge energy, flesh and movement, made at a scale only a workshop could produce. He also ran his reputation as a publishing business, commissioning engravings and woodcuts of his designs and protecting them with privileges, an early form of copyright, so that his compositions travelled as prints far beyond the churches and palaces that held them.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery in London prints its own paintings to order, on art paper or stretched canvas, framed or not; Le Chapeau de Paille is the one to start with, a portrait whose light and colour hold up in reproduction better than the crowded altarpieces do. Books: the standard reference is the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, the catalogue raisonné, more than forty books since the first volume of 1968; the Rubenshuis in Antwerp makes every volume older than fifteen years free online as searchable PDFs, so read it there before buying any volume secondhand. Originals: the paintings are not realistic. The realistic tier is the prints made under his eye. In 1618 he began soliciting a triple privilege to protect his designs in France, the Spanish Netherlands and the Dutch Republic; Lucas Vorsterman was his sole engraver from 1619 to 1621, Paulus Pontius and others followed, and in the early 1630s Christoffel Jegher cut large woodcuts after his designs. These are by other hands, after Rubens, and what you are paying for is how early and how good the impression is. Buy from a dealer who names the engraver, the state and the catalogue reference; a sheet labelled only "after Rubens" may be a much later copy.

Notes

The great altarpieces are still in Antwerp, The Elevation of the Cross in the cathedral; the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London all hold key easel paintings. His ceiling for the Banqueting House at Whitehall, The Apotheosis of James I, is still in place. Vorsterman and Rubens fell out violently in 1621, probably over who owned the rights to the prints, and the partnership ended.

Story

Rubens came to London in 1629 not to paint but to negotiate. He was an envoy of Philip IV of Spain, and England and Spain had been at war for five years. As a present for Charles I he painted Minerva protects Pax from Mars, an allegory carrying a political message in favour of peace. While the talks went on, Cambridge gave him an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1629, and in 1630 the king knighted him. He stayed until April 1630, and that November a peace treaty between England and Spain was signed.

The visit brought another commission. Charles wanted the ceiling of Inigo Jones's Banqueting House at Whitehall painted with the glorification of his father, James I. Rubens sketched it in London but completed it in his Antwerp studio, because of the scale of the job, and the canvases were installed in 1636.

Thirteen years later the building was put to another use. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649 Charles I stepped out of a first-floor window of the Banqueting House onto a scaffold built outside it for his own execution: the building whose ceiling Rubens had painted to glorify his father. The peace painting had a quieter fate: after passing through collections across Europe it was presented to the National Gallery by the Duke of Sutherland in 1828.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

National Gallery, London (Minerva protects Pax from Mars) ↗National Gallery, London (Le Chapeau de Paille) ↗The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗National Gallery, London ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

National Gallery, London custom prints (Le Chapeau de Paille, made to order) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

eBay (engravings after Rubens by Vorsterman) ↗eBay (woodcuts after Rubens by Jegher) ↗

See also

Jacob Jordaens 1593-1678Sebastiaen Vrancx 1573-1647Rembrandt van Rijn 1606-1669Johannes Vermeer 1632-1675Caravaggio 1571-1610Artemisia Gentileschi 1593-1656Frans Hals 1582-1666Wenceslaus Hollar 1607-1677

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