Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings  and Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens

A Double Special Exhibition Review by Stan Parchin

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Self-Portrait in Old Age, recto, 1633-40
Black chalk, heightened with white, on oatmeal paper,
pen and brown ink
Lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,
Royal Library, Windsor Castle

About the shows:

Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is the subject of two splendid special exhibitions on the East Coast this Winter. The shows' display schedules fortunately overlap by two weeks. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, runs from January 15 to April 3, 2005. Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, at the quaint hilltop Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut (a short distance from The Met in Manhattan), opened on October 2, 2004 and closes on January 30, 2005. The Met's 115-piece retrospective spanning the artist's entire career is not scheduled to travel. The Bruce Museum's show will be on view later this year at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California. It'll conclude its U.S. tour this Summer at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio. Both shows include major loans from American and foreign museums and private collections. Some of the oil sketches in Drawn by the Brush... will not be exhibited in all three of its venues.

Rubens' large-scale paintings of the late Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries can best be described as aristocratic Baroque. Beginning in Flanders, his major works were executed for the Catholic Church (the city's main artistic patron) and the Flemish nobility. He also accepted private commissions. While executing preparatory drawings (meant to remain private) and oil sketches for many of his artworks, he trained numerous apprentices in his vibrant and successful workshop. Both shows explore Rubens' creative genius through his draftsmanship using two different techniques.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Copy after the "Belvedere Torso", verso, ca. 1601-02
Red chalk, heightened with white, on paper
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rubens emerged as a court painter and diplomat of sorts. From 1600 to 1608, he traveled and lived in Italy, studying and copying Classical antique sculptures for their anatomical and aesthetic value. While in Rome, he copied works of Classical antiquity such as the Athenian Belvedere Torso (mid-1st Century B.C.) with its powerful musculature. Rubens' Study (ca. 1601-02) of it in the show is a recent purchase by The Met.

Rubens also studied the Italian High Renaissance paintings of Michelangelo (1475-1564). When in Venice, he voraciously absorbed the lessons of Titian (ca. 1485-1576) and Tintoretto (1518-94). Having worked for Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua (1562-1612) (a court immersed in Italian Renaissance art since the Fifteenth Century), afforded Rubens the opportunity to travel briefly to Spain. His subject matter included Biblical themes, Classical mythology, history, religion, nudes, portraiture, animals, hunting scenes, landscapes and complicated allegories.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
The Libyan Sibyl, 1601-02
Black and red chalk on paper
Departement des Arts Graphiques
du Musee du Louvre, Paris

The Met's show is divided into eight rooms with an introductory gallery and a study area. In Gallery 2, Rubens' Libyan Sibyl (1601–1602) clearly demonstrates his familiarity with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes in the Vatican. It's exhibited alongside Michelangelo's Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (ca. 1512), a masterpiece from the museum's Prints and Drawings Collection rarely on view.

Gallery 4 of the same show features four studies for Rubens' triptych (three-panel painting) The Raising of the Cross (1610-11), originally commissioned for the Church of St. Walburgis and now in Antwerp Cathedral. Study for the Figure of Christ (ca. 1610) is drawn in black chalk and charcoal with white on light tan paper. The viewer gains insight into the inner workings of Rubens' mind before he completed his masterpiece. Similarly, The Elevation of the Cross (ca. 1637-38), a horizontal oil sketch with vivid colors on paper in the Bruce Museum show, is reminiscent of the finished triptych's completed central panel. The pain-racked body of the upward-looking Christ nearly rips itself away from the cross being raised by weighty men on a sharp diagonal angle. The drama of this oil sketch is characteristic of religious painting during the Counter-Reformation period in Western Europe.

Perhaps the most fascinating works in The Met's special exhibition are some of Rubens' portrait drawings in Gallery 5. His portraits of Isabella Brant (ca. 1621), his first wife and Susanna Fourment (early 1620s), are as immediate and penetrating as his Self-Portrait in Old Age (1633-40). Rubens' intimate Portrait of a Little Boy with a Coral Necklace (ca. 1619), his youngest son Nicolaas, effortlessly engages the attention of the viewer as well. Even in this age of scientific discovery, children were advised to wear coral necklaces to protect them from fits and anxiety.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Nicolaas Rubens Wearing a Coral Necklace, ca. 1619
Black and red chalk, heightened with white chalk, with
pen and dark brown ink, on brownish paper
Albertina, Vienna

There's also a telling fleshy portrait of Marie de Médicis (ca. 1622), wife of King Henri IV of France (r. 1589-1610) and regent (1610-14) during the minority of her son Louis XIII (r. 1610-43). It provides a clear historical thread that connects Rubens, Marie and her grandiose artistic schemes.

Many of the oil sketches in Drawn by the Brush... in Greenwich, CT illustrate Rubens' familiarity with subjects from Classical antiquity. Marie capitalized on the artist's knowledge. She employed Rubens to decorate the walls of the Luxembourg Palace's Festival Gallery with 21 canvases in the grand Baroque style that she was accustomed to in her native Italy. Marie shrewdly used complex and contrived allegories in Rubens' royal commissions as propaganda to enhance her own lackluster political image. Many of these large compositions incorporate his well-known, round, robust female nudes (a Flemish artistic convention equated with prosperity), thereby satisfying both himself and his patron despite the pressures of the French courtiers.

The northern Baroque ideal of richness and lavishness that Rubens espoused in his artworks and later became his trademark is best exemplified by The Garden of Love (ca. 1630), several studies for which round out The Met's special presentation. Both shows explore the dynamic inventiveness of Peter Paul Rubens as the consummate draftsman of his age.

A newspaper article in last year's Toronto Star (October 10, 2004) suggested that Rubens, along with more modern artists, suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. This was supposedly due to exposure from the heavy metals in the pigments of his palette. If this were the case, it didn't seem to affect his artistic abilities. From 1635 on, Rubens lived in semi-retirement painting mostly landscapes.

Special thanks to Rev. Raymond J. Sweitzer, SJ, a distinguished linguist and Art History enthusiast at Fordham University, for
making this writer's trip to the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science possible.

About the catalogues:

Logan, Anne-Marie with Michiel Plomp. Peter Paul Rubens
(1577-1640): The Drawings (exh. cat.). New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005.

Sutton, Peter C., et al. Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches
by Peter Paul Rubens (exh. cat.). New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2004.

Both shows have full-color and black & white hardcover and softcover catalogues with thorough object descriptions and scholarly essays. Drawn by the Brush ... includes Nico van Hout's interesting discourse on "The Oil Sketch as a Vehicle for Rubens' Creativity". Regrettably, a remarkable oil sketch of a candlelit old woman and male child at the show's end is left out of the book.

For further reading:

Corsiglia, Christina, et. al. Rubens and His Age: Treasures from
the Hermitage Museum, Russia (exh. cat.). Ontario, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario/Merrill Holberton, 2001.

Piotrovsky, Mikhail, et al. Peter Paul Rubens: A Touch of Brilliance (exh. cat.). London: Prestel Publishing, Ltd., 2004.

Wood, Jeremy. Rubens: Drawings on Italy (exh. cat.).
Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2003.

"Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings" is on view from January 15 to April 3, 2005 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82 Street, New York, NY 10028 (Telephone: 212-535-7710; Website: www.metmuseum.org). The museum is open Tuesday through Thursday from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM and Friday and Saturday from 9:30 AM to 9:00 PM. SUGGESTED admission is $15.00 for adults. Paid parking is available in The Museum Garage. Lectures and gallery talks will be offered during the show's run. A recorded tour of the show is available for rental ($5.00 for members of the Museum and $6.00 for non-members).

"Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens" is on view until January 30, 2005 at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, One Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT 06830 (Telephone: 203-869-0376; Website: www.brucemuseum.org). The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM and Sunday from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Admission is $12.00 for adults. Parking on the museum's grounds is free.

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From your Guide: Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museums/Special Exhibitions, is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history. His interests include: the art and culture of Old and New Kingdom Egypt; the Italian and Northern Renaissances; Church history; and witchcraft, heresy and social dissent in late-medieval and early Modern Europe.