Rubens' home base
Rubens’ home base
Baroque, intelligent, complex, fascinating and surprising… are just some key words to describe Rubens’ style. His works can be viewed in glorious rooms in London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, St. Petersburg, Washington, Vienna and last but not least Antwerp! The city of Antwerp is the Master’s home base where your visitors can admire his house, workshop and grave. Some fifty of his paintings and oil sketches are permanently on show. Most of them have never left the building they were originally made in centuries ago. Rubens and Antwerp are inextricably linked as Andy Warhol is with New York.
Rubens’ House- Rubens’ House is still a very fine evocation of 17th century reality. This artist’s home enables your visitors to discover Rubens’ multifaceted talent: the painter, architect and diplomat, the collector and scientist, the husband and father.
Wapper 9-11 – 2000 Antwerp
www.rubenshuis.be
Peter Paul Rubens was born on 28 June 1577 after his Calvinist parents fled the Spanish led Antwerp. In Cologne, Peter Paul’s father almost paid the ultimate price for having an affair with the Princess of Orange. The young Peter undoubtedly led a turbulent childhood – his father dying while he was oung, the family moving back to Antwerp and reverting to Catholicism. Unable to afford an education for Peter, his mother enrolled him as an apprentice to the Antwerp artists Tobias Verhaecht, Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. They soon discovered his unparalleled talent. Like any inquisitive student of the arts at the time, he journeyed through Italy studying the Renaissance masters. It was here that his social skills came to the fore; he rubbed shoulders with royalty and became painter for the Duke of Mantua, a lover and collector of fine art. Fate cut his Italian stay short, he returned to Antwerp in 1608 when his mother passed away. The loss proved to be Antwerp’s gain. The rest of the story is not a rag to riches tale but one of true genius and driving ambition, being at the right place at the right time: Antwerp, a centre not only built by old nobility but home to flourishing trade and merchant families. Destiny would have it that Rubens lived in the Golden Age of Europe when kings and queens fashioned lavish palaces in honour of themselves. They applauded great artists with commissions for ceiling panels, tapestries, altarpieces and portraits. They adorned the walls of everywhere from churches and dining rooms to vacation residences and city halls. The grandeur of the time suited Rubens’ opulent style perfectly, and at 31 his commercial breakthrough was a fact. He was appointed as the ‘painter at court’ by the Regent Albert and Isabella. He bought a residence on the Wapper, an elegant Italian palazzo befitting an up-and-coming master. The house became his refuge from the world and his base when not traveling Europe as the guest of royalty. This artist was not a solitary soul; the Wapper was a hive of creativity where he designed a studio to house his ambitious plans and phenomenal productivity. His architectural flair was tested and excelled; yet another medium under his lavish belt. Arranged around an elegant inner courtyard with an Italian inspired Renaissance garden, it was the place of a thinker and a teacher. The studio produced works with the help of young apprentices, the most famous surely the young Anton Van Dyck. The young charges were happy to obey and fill in the lines for the great master while he took charge and in modern terms ‘marketed himself to the buyer’. During this time two of the most famous Rubens’ paintings, those that we see today in the Cathedral of Our Lady were created; ‘The Elevation of the Cross’ and ‘The Descent from the Cross’. Rubens with his apprentices was prolific artist, producing nearly 2,500 works within a 40-year career. He was also no doubt an outstanding teacher; to study under the ‘Prince of Baroque’ was a ticket to masterdom and an honour. In a city buzzing with specialists in a myriad of disciplines, Rubens proved a talent scout with a fine nose for historical cooperations, working with Jan Brueghel the Elder and the animal painter Frans Snyder. He used engravers trained by Goltzius and printmaking specialist Lucas Vorsterman. His friend Balthasar Moretus, publishing house owner and printer extraordinaire, helped him extend his fame by printing book title pages and prints for him. Each time remaining the instigator and accolade winner. The marketing paid off, commissions followed from all over Europe. “Due to his later appointments to the courts of the Infanta Isabella and the Archduke Ferdinand, Spanish viceroys of the Netherlands, Charles I in England, Marie de’ Médicí in France, and Philip IV in Spain, much of Rubens’s life was spent “on the road” or in preparing works for export. He fulfilled massive commissions for leaders of the church and state in Italy, Austria and Germany. These contacts would later serve him well as an ambassador and diplomat as would his language talent – he spoke fluent French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.”