He married a year after his mother's death, when he was in his thirty-third year. His first wife, Isabella Brant, was a connection of his own (and so was his second wife). He built and painted, in fresco, a fine house in Antwerp, and laid out a pleasant garden, which contained a rotunda, filled with his collection of pictures by the Italian masters, antique gems, &c. &c., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain friends—above all, to paint with might and main in company with his great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where Raphael was concerned, were, for the most part, Rubens' devoted comrades. Counting his work not only as the great object, but the great zest of his life, never did painter receive such sweeping and accumulating commissions, and never, even by Tintoret, were commissions executed with such undaunted, unhesitating expedition.
Withal Rubens frequently left his studio and went abroad, either to act as an unofficial ambassador, or to paint at the special request of some foreign sovereign. Thus he was residing in Paris in 1620, planning for Marie de Medici the series of remarkable pictures which commemorated her marriage with Henry IV. (When I was a little girl, I went occasionally to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal personages, high church dignitaries, patron saints, and gods and goddesses.) In 1628 Rubens was in Spain on a mission from his sovereign to her kinsman, Philip IV.; in the following year he was in England, on a service of a similar description to Charles I., from whom, even as Rubens had already received it from King Philip, the painter had the honour of knighthood.
In the mean time Rubens' first wife died, after a union of seventeen years, in 1626; and four years later, in 1630, the painter, when he was a man of fifty years, re-married another connection of his own, Helena Fourment, a girl only in her sixteenth year. Both of his wives were handsome, fair, full-formed Flemish beauties. Elizabeth (in Spanish, Isabella) Brant's beauty was of a finer order than that of her successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the greater world without, as are the faces of these two women, and above all, that of Helena Fourment. He had seven children, who frequently figure in their mothers' portraits. He has left notable portraits of his two sons by his first wife, of his eldest daughter, Clara Eugenia, when eight years of age, and of his daughter Elizabeth, a buxom baby, dressed in velvet and point lace, playing with toys.
After a life of unbroken success and the highest honours, the last distinction conferred on Rubens was, that he was chosen to arrange the gala, and to be the right-hand man who should conduct the Cardinal Infant, the successor of Clara Eugenia, on his first entrance into Antwerp. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time of his death, and only a part of his collection, which was then sold, brought so large a sum in those days, as twenty thousand pounds. Rubens' second wife, Helena Fourment, to whom he had been married ten years, survived him, a widow at twenty-six years of age, and married again.
Rubens' portrait is even better known than those of his wives, for, as I have said of Raphael in his popularity, Rubens in his life is the beau-ideal of a painter to the many. The portrait is worthy of the man, with something gallant in the manliness, and with thought tempering what might have been too much of bravado and too much of débonnaireté in the traits. His features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The great flapping hat, worn alike by men and women, slightly cocked to one side, is the perfection of picturesque head gear. Equally picturesque, and not in the slightest degree effeminate on a man like Rubens, is the falling collar of pointed mechlin, just seen above the cloak draped in large folds.
In his own day Rubens was without a rival as a painter. In a much later day Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced Rubens 'perhaps the greatest master in the mechanical part of the art, the best workman with his tools that ever exercised a pencil.' His consummate excellence lay in his execution and colouring. It is brought as a reproach against his painting, that his noblest characters, even his sacred characters, were but big, brawny, red and white Flemings. His imagination only reached a certain height, and yet, if it were a very earthly Flemish imagination, it could be grandly, as it was always vigorously, earthly and Flemish. At the same time he could be deficient where proportion, and even where all the laws of art, are concerned.
It is right that I should, with regret and shame, say this of Rubens, whose geniality bordered on joviality, and whose age was a grosser age than our own, that he debased his genius by some foul and revolting pictures.
Of the general distinction between Rubens and some of his predecessors I should like to quote Mr Ruskin's passage in his defence:
'A man long trained to love the monk's vision of Fra Angelico, turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens, which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that, while Angelico prayed and wept in his olive shade, there was different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:—wild seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful breeding of the stout horses and cattle; close setting of brick-walls against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands, and gross stoutening of bodies in all this; gross jovialities of harvest homes, and Christmas feasts, which were to be the reward of it; rough affections, and sluggish
imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod humanities, but humanities still,—humanities which God had his eye upon, and which won perhaps, here and there, as much favour in His sight as the wasted aspects of the whispering monks of Florence (Heaven forbid that it should not be so, since the most of us cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and reapers still). And are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens' masculine and universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human rendering of it, gentleman though he was by birth, and feeling, and education, and place, and, when he chose, lordly in conception also? He had his faults—perhaps great and lamentable faults,—though more those of his time and his country than his own; he has neither cloister-breeding nor boudoir-breeding, and is very unfit to paint either in missals or annuals; but he has an open sky and wide-world breeding in him that we may not be offended with, fit alike for king's court, knight's camp, or peasants cottage.'