LATE WORKS BY RUBENS
The closing decade of Rubens’s life is represented by five pictures of considerable importance. Of Queen Tomyris with the Head of Cyrus (No. 2084) there is an earlier, large, and deservedly famous version in Lord Darnley’s collection; but the Louvre picture exceeds it in beauty of design and in unity of colour. It was painted about the same time (cca. 1632) as Religion crowned by a Genius (No. 2126), one of the sketches for the ceiling at Whitehall. Of peculiar interest, owing to its unfinished state which reveals the master’s method of portraiture, is the superb portrait group of Hélène Fourment, the Artist’s Second Wife, and Two of her Children (No. 2113, [Plate XXII.]). Only the heads, which are remarkable for an intensity of expression that is rarely to be found in Rubens’s paintings, are finished. All the rest is loosely and thinly sketched in sepia heightened with swift touches of brighter colour. It was painted about 1636, which is also the approximate date of A Flemish Kermesse (No. 2115), an almost unique instance of the master applying the exuberant energy of his magic brush to a subject in which the expression of intense vitality and full-blooded sensuousness assumes the aspect almost of bestiality—which, however, in no way detracts from the artistic value of the painting. To turn from this to A Joust by the Moat of a Castle (No. 2116) is to pass from coarse realism to pure romanticism, inspired probably by the associations of the picturesque Castle of Steen, which Rubens had bought in 1635, and which forms the setting for this scene of knightly prowess. This, and the marvellous and strangely modern little Landscape (No. 2117), in which the morning sun is seen rising from the autumnal mist, belong to the closing years of Rubens’s life. He died at Antwerp on May 20, 1640.