WHEN I first went to see this exhibition, last year in Brussels,
it was entitled "Sensation and Sensuality", as were the Flemish,
French, and Dutch versions of the excellently informative
catalogue. The focus on Rubens, despite the unlikely nod towards
Jane Austen and the world of 1811, was centred on the six heady
perennial themes of Violence, Power, Lust, Compassion, Elegance,
and Poetry.
We were urged to consider whether the German-born Peter Paul
Rubens (1570-1640) was the Quentin Tarantino of his day. As a
political apologist for regimes as disparate as those of Catherine
de Medici in France and James VI and I in England, was he a
propagandist in the style of the later film-makers Sergei
Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl? Were his voluptuous nudes intended
for a lascivious audience, or do they betray the artist as little
more than a cunning voyeur?
In the sedate rooms of Burlington House in Piccadilly, the
curators cannot ignore these aspects of the exhibition; presumably
the RA chose to be more cautious with the title after the unlikely
runaway success of the 1997 exhibition of Young British Artists,
"Sensation", which, at the time, drew the hostile criticism of even
the Mayor of New York, Rudi Giuliani.
The emphasis in the hang has also shifted more to demonstrating
the importance of Rubens for the development of Western European
art over the past four centuries, both as a collector of art in his
own right, and as an artist who deployed earlier classical and
Renaissance compositions in his work.
This was always the intention of the Rubens exhibition that was
first planned a decade back for Antwerp as a follow-up to the
400th- anniversary exhibitions commemorating Anthony Van Dyck as
his most celebrated pupil.
Those shows, in Antwerp and London (Arts, 24 September 1999),
suggested how Rubens might come to be seen as an artist diplomat
whose career knew no bounds. The current presentation was,
therefore, conceived as an appropriate way to celebrate Herman van
Rompuy's presidency of the European Council.
Redevelopment and refurbishment of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts
in Antwerp has further delayed its reopening to 2018, so that this
exhibition had to be shown in the hapless galleries of BOZAR in
Brussels. It looks incomparably better in the state rooms of the
Royal Academy.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy,
lauded Rubens to the skies, and John Constable lectured on his
great landscapes, whereas John Ruskin, writing in 1860 in
Modern Painters, damned him for being "without any clearly
perceptible traces of a soul".
Like him or loathe him, this display offers three rather
different exhibitions in one.
In the first place - and perhaps for most visitors this is all
that is required to make a great day out -we get to see a large
number of works by Rubens and his atelier. This is not, of course,
a monographic show on the scale of the Brussels one in the winter
of 2007/08, although necessarily it includes some of the same
pieces; but the Flemish artist easily dominates the exhibition,
despite the inclusion of Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne, Manet, and
Kokoschka.
The sheer ferocity of the 1616 Tiger, Lion and Leopard
Hunt (Rennes), in which oriental hunters prove no match for
the wild cats, is almost overpowering, matched in part by the
history of the canvas itself, which was bought from the artist by
the Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria. It was confiscated from
Schleissheim by the Napoleonic occupying forces in 1800 and taken
to France; it has never been returned.
Equally as violent is the later oil sketch that derived from it,
in which the turbaned huntsman is trapped beneath his own steed as
a lioness pounces. This smaller work (44 × 50cm) had once belonged
to Lord Cholmondeley at Houghton Hall, but was sold in 1994, and is
now in Munich.
The animal savagery of both immediately brings to mind the
popular 19th-century taste for so many of the works on both sides
of the Channel of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Sir Edwin
Landseer (1802-73), and the exhibition demonstrates how the
contemporary engravings of Bolswaert made The Tiger, Lion and
Leopard Hunt widely known to other artists and collectors.
Other engravers continued this process of dissemination, although
it is not clear that Soutman or Suyderhof were supervised by Rubens
in person.
This interplay, between masterpieces by the Flemish master
himself and their wider influence on others, marks the second
aspect of the exhibition which I found the most beguiling: the
transmission of images and, therefore, of reputations through a
variety of media.
When Rubens painted The Crucifixion for the high altar
of the Antwerp Church of the Récollets, the Friars Minor, at the
invitation of the Burgomaster, Nicolaas Rockox, in 1620, its bold
composition of the vivid scene (John 19.34), in which one of the
executioners pierces his side with a lance, drew universal
praise.
Around 1630 , Rubens asked Boetius Adamsz Bolswaert
(c.1580-1633) to draw the work and engrave it for him.
The 1620 modello for the altarpiece is currently on
loan to the National Gallery in London from the V&A, but the
1631 engraving by Bolswaert is in the exhibition, while the
original altarpiece of the Coup de Lance remains safely in
its church in Antwerp.
The engraving circulated widely is best-represented by a
porcelain dish made a century later in Jingdezhen in China by an
unknown artist at the time of the fourth emperor of the Qing
Dynasty, c.1720-30. The unusually coloured dish, which now
belongs to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, may first have
been used by Jesuit missionaries to proselytise among the Chinese
when Christianity was briefly tolerated there. It was later brought
back to Europe by the Dutch East India Company, and has now come
full circle, as it were, being bought in 2011 for a Flemish
collection.
A similar transmission of ideas, from canvas to print to a later
canvas by another artist, is responsible for the inclusion here of
an altarpiece by Bartlomé Murillo depicting The Conversion of
St Paul (Prado), undertaken late in life as a companion piece
of The Martyrdom of St Andrew, when Murillo copied a
Rubens altarpiece from the Hospital de San Andrés de los Flamencos
in Madrid.
The original Rubens painting of Saul's dramatic encounter on the
road to Damascus was probably commissioned for King Władyslaw IV of
Poland but was destroyed in 1945. Its composition, whose flurry of
activity harkens back to the tumultuousness of the 1617 Hunt scene,
was widely known through another of Bolswaert's faithful
engravings. Although Murillo, who rarely depicted drama in his
religious paintings for Seville, has tempered some of the Baroque
theatricality of the original, the forceful Conversion is
clearly derived from the earlier work.
Other artists were equally fortunate in seeing the originals for
themselves; Jean-Honoré Fragonard travelled through Italy after he
had trained at the French Academy in Rome, and in Genoa would have
seen the artist's copy of his altarpiece of The Virgin and
Child with Saints which had been placed above his own tomb in
1644. Fragonard's black-chalk drawing (British Museum) equally
captures the soft plasticity of the flesh and the hard reflective
surfaces of St George's armour.
As Constable himself observed and often copied, Rubens
"delighted in phenomena; rainbows upon a stormy sky - bursts of
sunshine - moonlight - meteors and impetuous torrents".
To underscore this, on the heels of the recent remarkable
Constable show at the V&A, which made much the same point,
visitors in London get to see Constable's large oil sketch for
The Hay Wain (1821) and his view of Hampstead Heath,
Branch Hill Pond.
The third aspect of this winter treat in Piccadilly which makes
it such a rewarding experience is the sheer range of the pictorial
devices that Rubens brought to painting, whether of landscapes
(here the finest has to be Landscape with Rainbow, even
though it was dismissed by Turner, who saw it in the Louvre in
1802, and was underwhelmed), or in his mythological scenes, often
an excuse for classical nudity, or his portraits, which, in the
subtle reworking of Van Dyck, became the norms of social acceptance
in later generations.
It is easy for us to dismiss the Low Countries as flat barren
lands, but even a passing visit to Benelux makes one realise the
gradations of the land that Rubens came to know well after his
return from Italy (1608). Cardinal Mazarin once owned the large
panel painting of The Carters which dates from
c.1629. In 1726, it passed from the estate of the 1st Earl
of Cadogan into Robert Walpole's collection at Houghton Hall, and
at the time it was probably the most widely known Rubens landscape
in a British collection. It was among the many pictures bought for
Catherine II in 1779 (Arts,16 August 2013), and has now been loaned
from St Petersburg.
How much of it is observed from life and how much is an
allegorical invention remains a moot point, but the trundling wagon
appears out of control on a dangerous slope, and the arching
foliage above a rocky outcrop appealed to many. Gainsborough,
Turner, and Constable, of course, gained much by copying it.
Rubens himself became immoderately successful, and was decorated
by princes at the courts of the Empire and here in the UK. He was
clearly at ease depicting the Grimaldi countess and her dwarf
(Bankes Collection, National Trust), but in Britain his portraits
were often later attributed to his pupil Van Dyck, who might be
acclaimed as the progenitor of the "swagger" portrait, introducing
a style of flattery which has served the rising bourgeoisie and
nouveaux riches ever since.
So the exhibition flourishes a full-length portrait by Richard
Cosway (George IV commissioned the 1784 portrait of Elizabeth
Milbanke, Viscountess Melbourne), and an early work by Thomas
Lawrence of a frosty-looking Viscountess Cremorne (1789), who is no
longer young. An American arriviste, she has cast aside
her coronation robes as if to announce that she had no need for
titles in the Irish gazette after 20 years of marriage to Ireland's
wealthiest landowner.
Lawrence was perhaps more discreet or sympathetic the following
year, when he portrayed Mrs Arthur Annesley and two of her
children, in which her younger son, in his red velvet suit, cuddles
a rabbit. Ruskin reckoned that Rubens had a soul only when he
painted children, a point clearly not lost on Lawrence in this
unfinished work.
"Rubens and his Legacy" is at the Royal Academy, Burlington
House, Piccadilly, London W1, until 10 April. Phone 020 7300
8000.
www.royalacademy.org.uk