Master of Northern Baroque
The Sketches of Rubens. By Leo van Puyvelde. (Kegan Paul. 42s.)
THIS book, which first appeared in French eight years ago, seems to have originated in the important exhibition of sketches by Rubens held in Brussels in 5937. Compiled by a well-known authority, it is written primarily for the specialist, and presupposes throughout a detailed knowledge of Rubens' life and style. But even those to whom its academic content is of no concern will find it a stimu- lating introduction to the creative processes of the artist whom Professor van Puyvelde terms " the great master of Northern Baroque ". and whom others will regard as the greatest Baroque painter.
A new pictorial style connotes, not merely a change of form, but a change in the methods by which paintings are produced. Baroque was no exception to this rule, and whereas in the sixteenth century paintings were generally worked up from graphic sketches (though use was also made of small oil studies), in the seventeenth century chalk or pen studies for compositions were to some extent superseded by the oil sketches, which are dealt with in the present book. Nowhere do these oil sketches assume greater significance than with Rubens, for Rubens' works were, from a preternaturally early stage, thought out in terms of paint. Sometimes so summary as to be mere brush drawings, sometimes so highly finished as to become small paintings; these autograph oil studies, with their sustained colouristic sensibility and their astonishing dexterity of handling, reveal in their full flood the irrepressible vitality and the effortless invention which distinguish Rubens from other artists.
At the same time there are obvious disadvantages in isolating one phase of a painter's creative procedure, and Professor van Puyvelde sometimes gives way to a tendency to discuss as ends in themselves works which were devised as means in the development of a larger whole. " Imaginative impetus " and " temperamental energy " are present in abundance. But of the self-criticism and the colossal constructive talent which came into play when Rubens' sketches were expanded to the scale of paintings there is scarcely any trace. Here and there, where Professor van Puyvelde reproduces an earlier and a later study for the same painting, the Frankfurt sketch and the Berlin model for the Saint-Augustin altarpiece, for example, or the three sketches for the Whitehall ceiling at Leningrad, Vier- houten and Minneapolis, this aspect of Rubens' genius comes momentarily to the fore. But elsewhere we are dealing with the raw material from which great paintings were made.
The hundred and four plates are arranged chronologically—par- ticularly welcome is a group of studies for that great monument of Baroque painting, the lost decorations for the church of St. Charles Borrommeo in Antwerp—and are accompanied by a catalogue which is likely to prove more useful than Professor von Puyvelde's rather diffuse introductory text. A number of points in the Swiss edition have been modified, and the first plate, an early sketch of the Adoration of the Shepherds at Leningrad, is now referred to a painting in St. Paul at Antwerp and not to the Fermo altarpiece. A recent Spanish analysis of the tapestry sketches of the Triumph of the Eucharist, has, however, been overlooked.
JOHN POPE-HENNESSY.
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