AND ANOTHER THING
The ideal painter to make one forget the horrors of modern art
PAUL JOHNSON
Icelebrated the opening of Tate Modern, art's new Chamber of Horrors, by buying a vast tome about a true artist, Peter Paul Rubens. This 600-page folio, one of the heaviest volumes I have encountered for some time, commemorates the great exhibi- tion The Age of Rubens held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1994. I have been mining industriously into its pages. Rubens has a special significance for me: he is the perfect painter and as a moral human being, the ideal representative of that noblest of the arts. From the time he left school in 1590, aged 13, to his death 50 years later, he never ceased to educate him- self in his craft, his dolcissima profession as he called it. To the end, he drew from life, studied intently the masters — some of his copies of the leading 16th-century Italians are marvels, even improving on the origi- nals — was constantly revising, honing and extending his skills, trying new subjects or attacking them in different ways, and inves- tigating the possibilities of new technology. He was exceptionally generous in passing on his skills to his pupils and assistants, led by Van Dyck. There was no hype or spinning about Rubens: all solid hard work, saturated with high-order talent, occasionally illuminated by sheer genius. He was the son of a Protes- tant lawyer but he became and remained a sincere and orthodox Catholic, up at dawn for the 'first Mass', then at it all day. Unlike supreme but undependable masters like da Vinci and Michelangelo, he never failed to complete a commission. His only unfin- ished series, the life of Henri IV, intended to complement the magnificent pictorial vita of Marie de Medicis, now in the Lou- vre, was stopped by the machinations of Cardinal Richelieu. Some of his large-scale work was ephemeral, such as his decoration of the entire city of Antwerp for a tri- umphal entry in April 1635, which involved painted floats and arches, huge stages, ban- ners, flags and porticos. Rubens conscript- ed the whole artistic community of the city for this project and supervised their efforts. All has now gone, except for a few oil sketches. Gone, too, are many of his mas- terworks, in fires and wars or consumed by damp in neglected buildings. But the sur- viving corpus is huge and always of high quality. If it doesn't look first-class, you can be sure it is not by Rubens, whatever the label says. Yet he worked at great speed, drawing his outlines rapidly, using a brush with flawless accuracy and extending the whole of his arm to create uninterrupted strokes of vast length and majesty. Behind this physical skill was considerable learning, constantly added to, a knowledge of Latin and modern languages, and excellent taste in the applied arts. The splendid art-palace he designed and built for himself in Antwerp sums up all that is delightful in the late Renaissance. The world honoured him. The King of Spain gave him a peerage, he received a knighthood from Charles I and Cambridge made him an MA. But he was never proud. He spoke and joked with all. For a man so successful, famous and rich, it is remarkable that he never aroused the jealousy of fellow artists. Those who knew him testified to his magnanimity, his sunny personality, his earnest conversation about deep matters of the mind and soul, and his gift for friendship.
There were shadows in his life, of course. Rubens had a passion for peace, as his work demonstrates again and again. But he lived in time of war. His international fame gave him access to all the courts of Europe — 'I am a citizen of the world' as he put it — and from his late twenties he was entrusted with diplomatic missions. This happened to many well-known artists, and their tasks were usually of a minor nature. But in Rubens's case his diplomatic skills proved so trustworthy that his missions became gradually more weighty. He must be the only artist who ever negotiated a major international treaty. Rubens did not grudge these efforts because he regarded war as the enemy of art and felt it his duty to do all he could to restore harmony in Europe. But diplomacy wrenched painful holes out of his time, and still more his patience. He hated courts, their mummery, artificialities, boredom and lies. After his last diplomatic assignment on behalf of the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, the Infan- ta Isabella, he told her that 'as the sole reward for so many efforts' all he wanted was `to be spared from such duties in future' and to be 'allowed to serve her in my own home, exercising my beloved pro- fession'. He said he had met destiny often enough and now 'cut through ambition's golden knots to reclaim my freedom and peace of mind'.
There were other reasons. In 1626, his beautiful wife, Isabella Brandt, still only in her twenties, was struck down by plague. Rubens was desolated by the loss of 'a per- son whom I must love and cherish as long as Hive'. But four years later he was smitten by the 16-year-old daughter of one of his clients. Helene Fourment was the prettiest of three handsome sisters (another, Suzan- na, figures in the famous National Gallery portrait, the 'Chapeau de Paille'). She loved him too, though he was already 53, and gave him five children, one of them born after his death. She figures again and again in his work, in the enchanting 'Hagar in the Wilderness' (now in Dulwich), as one of the ladies in 'Conversatie a la Mode', which many call his happiest picture (Prado), and in the famous Vienna nude, 'Het Pelsken' (the little fur), showing her naked, clutching an ermine coat. Those who complain. about the fleshiness of Rubens's women should study this noble work, full of truth and beauty, obviously painted with sheer delight as well as affection. That she was proud of this picture is attested by the fact that he specifically left it to her in his will, in addi- tion to half his property.
La Belle Helene was clearly a central reason why Rubens wanted to have done with diplomacy. Having completed his magnificent house in Antwerp, in 1635 he bought the Chateau de Steen and its estate, and thereafter lived much of his remaining years as a country gentleman, but with a difference. Rubens had always loved landscape painting, having carefully studied the works of Old Bruegel. There was little market, as yet, for landscape so Rubens painted them for his own plea- sure, when on holiday — fewer than 40 all told. In his last years he indulged himself, in and around the château. He painted one of the house itself, in the background, a man shooting wildfowl in the fore- ground, and the fields stretching to infini- ty. It is a painting to make you jump for joy. It belonged to Sir George Beaumont, the baronet-turned-amateur painter who figures prominently in Farington's Diaries. Constable loved it so much that, when he stayed with Sir George, he was allowed to lug it into his bedroom so that it was the first thing he saw when he awoke in the morning. Sir George gave it to the Nation- al Gallery as part of the original founda- tion, and there it hangs to console art- lovers like myself whenever the infamies of modern art become unbearable.
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