PETER PAUL RUBENS
The Louvre owes its almost unequalled wealth in paintings by Rubens to the master’s relations with Marie de Médicis and her Court; and to this reason is due the fact that by far the largest portion of the fifty-one authentic works wholly or partly from his brush, which now form part of this great collection, date approximately from, or immediately before and after, the time during which he was busy with the famous series painted by order of that queen for the decoration of the Luxembourg Palace, and now to be seen in a setting appropriate to their florid sumptuousness in the new Rubens Gallery at the Louvre. Even so, the collection comprises examples of every phase of the master’s colossal activity—religious and historical compositions, allegorical paintings, landscapes, portraits, still life, and even genre-pieces, like the Kermesse (No. 2115), in which he successfully competes with Teniers on a ground peculiarly his own.
Born at Siegen in 1577, Rubens received his artistic education at Antwerp from Tobias Verhaecht, a landscape painter, Adam van Noort, and O. van Veen. At the age of twenty-three he went to Italy and entered the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, studying in their own country the works of the great Italian masters, and especially the Venetians, from whose glorious colour he derived more benefit than from his early training. With the exception of a journey to the Court of Philip III. at Madrid, where he was sent on a mission by the Duke of Mantua in 1603, Rubens spent the eight years from 1600 to 1608 in the various Italian centres, and especially in Rome, where he painted, about 1606, the little Landscape with Ruins (No. 2119), which is of interest not only as showing to what degree he was at that time influenced by the Roman school, and by the Carracci, but also as being the very first landscape known to have been produced by him. The same view of the Palatine Hill is to be recognised in the background of the Four Philosophers at the Pitti Palace, and in the portrait of Woverius in the Arenberg collection. Of about the same time, though the figures would appear to have been added at a considerably later date, is the Landscape with a Rainbow (No. 2118).