Famous European Artists

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

How few in this world learn the beauty and the power of being "patient to the last degree!" How few learn early in life to avoid gossip, to speak well of others, and to make peace!

In 1630, four years after the death of Isabella Brandt, Rubens married her sister's daughter, Helena Fourment, a wealthy girl of sixteen, while the painter was fifty-three. He seems to have thought her beautiful, as she appears in nearly all his subsequent paintings. At Blenheim are two portraits of the fair Helena: one, representing himself and his wife in a flower garden with their little child, Dr. Waagen regards as one of the most perfect family pictures in the world.

In the Belvidere, Vienna, is a magnificent portrait of Helena Fourment. She bore to Rubens five children in the ten remaining years of his life.

He soon bought a lovely country home, the Château de Steen at Elewyt, which was sold at his death for forty thousand dollars. "It was," says Huet, "a feudal castle, surrounded on all sides with water. Rubens, though nothing need have prevented him from demolishing the castle and erecting an Italian villa on its site, respected its mediæval architecture. One may take it that the mediæval turrets and the mediæval moat made up, according to him, an agreeable whole with the sylvan surroundings. An imagination like his felt at home everywhere. The principal charm of 'Steen' lay in its being but a day's journey from Antwerp,—that there wife and children could breathe the beneficent country air in unstinted draughts, and the artist himself could indulge his leisure and find new subjects. It is all but certain that the idyl of 'The Rainbow' and the bacchanalia of 'The Village Fair' were painted nowhere else but at Steen....

"Though the two centuries and a half that have elapsed since then have altered the means of locomotion and communication so thoroughly as to make them difficult of recognition, it needs no great effort of the imagination to follow the Rubens family from stage to stage on its flitting to the summer quarters. We can fancy him sitting one of those splendid horses he so magnificently bestrode. A team of four or six less costly, but well-fed, well-groomed, and well-equipped cattle drags through the loose sand or heavy clay the still heavier coach, where, between children and nursemaids, thrones the mistress of the house, not very securely; for she, like the rest, is considerably jolted. She wears the large hat with feathers, beneath which the charming face meets the spectators, as in the picture in the Louvre. A solid train with provisions for the long journey brings up the rear of the procession. Proud of his young wife, anxious as to her every want, the great artist, whose hair and beard are plentifully besprinkled with gray, does not leave the carriage door by her side."

During the last years of his life Rubens suffered much from gout, but, with the help of his pupils, he accomplished a great amount of work. Many of his scholars became famous: Van Dyck, Jordaens, Snyders, Teniers, and others.

Van Dyck was twenty-two years younger than Rubens, and entered his studio when he was seventeen. In four years his works began to be almost as much esteemed as those of his master. It is said that one day, during the absence of Rubens from his studio, the pupils, crowding around a freshly painted picture, pushed against it, thus effacing the arm and chin of a Virgin. They were greatly distressed over the matter, when Van Hoeck cried out: "Van Dyck is the handiest; he must repair the mischief." The restoration was so deftly made that Rubens did not observe the accident.

Later, when Van Dyck came back from Italy, after five years of study there, he found little sale for his pictures, and was depressed. Rubens went to his studio, comforted him, and bought all his paintings which were finished. He did the same thing with a rival who had maligned him because he was not as successful as the great painter. When Rubens died, he owned in his gallery over three hundred pictures, many by Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, and Van Dyck, and ninety by his own hand.

In 1635, when Philip IV. of Spain had appointed as governor of the Netherlands his own brother, the Cardinal Infanta Ferdinand, Sir Peter Paul Rubens was deputed to design the triumphal arches and ornamental temples for his solemn entry into Antwerp. These beautiful designs were afterwards engraved and published, with a learned Latin description by his friend Gevaerts, though they were not ready for the press till the year after Rubens's death. On the day when Ferdinand entered Antwerp, Rubens was ill at his house, but the new governor showed his appreciation of his talent and learning by calling upon him in his own home, as Queen Marie de' Medici, the Infanta Isabella, and other famous persons had done.

His last piece of work was the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," for St. Peter's Church at Cologne. He asked for a year and a half to complete the picture, but death came before it was finished. It represents the apostle nailed to the cross with his head downwards, surrounded by six executioners. "He has proved," says Gustave Planche, "over and over again that he knew all the secrets of the human form, but never has he proved it so clearly as in the Crucifixion of Peter."