Peter Paul Rubens: Painter, Diplomat, Workshop Boss

In May 1600 Rubens left for Italy. In Venice he absorbed the light and drama of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. The Duke of Mantua hired him, mainly to copy Renaissance paintings, and by the end of his first year he had traveled the country with his sketchbook.¹

In Rome, from 1601, he quickly took in the new style of Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio: bold naturalism combined with the heroic figures of Michelangelo and Raphael. In 1603 the duke sent him to Spain on his first diplomatic mission.¹

In 1608 news that his mother was gravely ill brought him rushing home, too late. He stayed. The rulers of Flanders, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, made him their court painter on generous terms: no taxes, no guild restrictions, and permission to stay in Antwerp and run his own studio.¹

In 1610 he bought a grand townhouse and added a palatial studio, an Italian villa transplanted to Antwerp. His great altarpieces for the cathedral followed. One of them, The Descent from the Cross, became famous through an engraving; among its admirers was the young Rembrandt.¹

How did one man produce so much? With a large studio of assistants, apprentices, collaborators and engravers.¹

A major painting often began as a modello, a small oil sketch by Rubens himself. Assistants then painted the full-size work, and Rubens usually painted the key areas and retouched the whole. Engravings spread the compositions across Europe.¹ The Met's Wolf and Fox Hunt, above, is catalogued as the work of “Rubens and Workshop.”²

His most gifted assistant was the young Anthony van Dyck, who arrived around 1616 and stayed four years. Rubens also teamed up with specialists, like the animal painter Frans Snyders and the flower and landscape painter Jan Bruegel.¹

From 1621 Rubens also worked as a confidential agent for the Spanish Habsburgs. His fame as “the painter of princes and the prince of painters” let him travel between royal courts, where rulers and ministers discussed affairs of state while sitting for their portraits.¹

In 1628 he spent seven months in Madrid, copying Titian in the royal collection while Philip IV's young court painter watched: Diego Velázquez, the future painter of Las Meninas. In London, the peace treaty of 1630 between England and Spain can be attributed to Rubens personally. Charles I knighted him; Philip IV did the same in 1631, making him the only painter honored by the kings of both England and Spain.¹

Isabella Brant died in 1626. In December 1630 Rubens married Helena Fourment, 16, who inspired some of his most personal late portraits. He often identified her with Venus, as in his glowing Venus and Adonis.¹

Done with politics, he painted with a looser, more tactile, almost “impressionistic” brush, bought a country estate and painted its landscapes. Despite attacks of “gout,” probably arthritis, he kept working until his death in Antwerp in May 1640.¹

Britannica sums up his art as a fusion of Flemish realism and the classical tradition of the Italian Renaissance, and notes that the larger the project, the more it suited him.¹ His name also comes up in the history of thick, textured paint, as we saw with impasto.