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Updated: June 29, 2025
Hence in all his works we have the sense, first of all, of an overmastering sincerity; then of a prodigious wealth of fancy; then of a marvellous acquaintance with his material. His imagination has all the vivacity and tumultuousness of Rubens's, but its images, if not better understood, which would perhaps be impossible, are more compact and their evolution more orderly.
All this while Lady Kicklebury was looking at Fanny, and Fanny was holding her eyes down; and I knew that between her and this poor Hicks there could be nothing serious, for she had laughed at him and mimicked him to me half a dozen times in the course of the day. We "do the Rubens's," as Lady Kicklebury says; we trudge from cathedral to picture-gallery, from church to church.
Well, although they are abominable superstitions, yet these queer little offerings seem to me to be a great deal more pious than Rubens's big pictures; just as is the widow with her poor little mite compared to the swelling Pharisee who flings his purse of gold into the plate. A couple of days of Rubens and his church pictures makes one thoroughly and entirely sick of him.
Here he proceeded to build a wonderful house said to have cost him 60,000 florins after designs of his own in the Italian style, which he filled with the treasures he had collected in Italy. Rubens's first pictures were nearly all of them religious subjects.
Even as the fragment of Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari survives in the free translation of Rubens's well-known drawing in the Louvre, we see how he has made out of the unimportant cavalry combat, yet without conventionality or undue transposition, a representation unequalled in art of the frenzy generated in man and beast by the clash of arms and the scent of blood.
This fact alone would prepare us to anticipate pleasant things for him and from him. In those days of guilds, there were many rules and regulations. Van Noort, Rubens's teacher, was dean of the painters' guild and through his influence the guild recognised Rubens as "master," which meant that he was qualified to take pupils; thus he was pupil and teacher at the same time.
The remarkable freedom and originality of Rubens's treatment of classical subjects is thus accounted for. Under the surface is his familiarity with the antique, but instead of carrying this above ground, he builds on it a palace in accordance with the times and circumstances in which he lived. The principles of classical art underlie the modern structure.
But I would not upon any account have missed the sight of Rubens's "Massacre of the Innocents." Such expressive horrors were never yet transferred to canvas, and Moloch himself might have gazed at them with pleasure.
Does not the chief cook have aides under him? Did not Rubens's pupils paint on his canvases? Had not Lawrence assistants for his backgrounds? For myself, being also du metier, I confess I would often like to have a competent, respectable, and rapid clerk for the business part of my novels; and on his arrival, at eleven o'clock, would say, "Mr.
John Rubens was Peter Paul's father, and he was a learned man, a druggist, but he had also studied law, and had been town councillor and alderman in the town where he was born. Life went easily enough with him till the reformation wrought by Martin Luther began to change John Rubens's way of thinking, and he turned from Catholic to Lutheran.
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