A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

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853. THE TRIUMPH OF SILENUS.

Rubens (Flemish: 1577-1640). See 38.

For the subject see under 93. "Rubens painted these subjects with a gusto in which there is something fearful, so wonderful is the skill, the felicity of execution, the life, the energy, the fancy displayed—so gross and so repulsive the sentiment. In Niccolo Poussin's Bacchanalian scenes we have the licence and the revels of gods and nymphs, and of the golden age. Rubens gives us, with perhaps a truer moral feeling but more depraved taste, mere animal sensuality, with all its most brutal attributes" (Mrs. Jameson's Handbook to the Private Galleries of London, p. 362). This picture was in the artist's possession at the time of his death, and was then bought for Cardinal Richelieu. It was afterwards in the collection of Sir Robert Peel, who gave £1100 for it.