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Updated: June 29, 2025
In the Belvedere at Vienna there is a picture by Rubens of the dead Christ in the arms of the usual small group: His mother is removing with a light, tender touch a thorn which is still piercing the cold brow. The whole picture is in the same spirit, and I never could look at it with dry eyes. Yet in Rubens's hands this and all kindred subjects are generally repulsive.
"What hotel do you go to?" I asked of Lady Kicklebury. "We go to the 'Saint Antoine' of course. Everybody goes to the 'Saint Antoine," her ladyship said. "We propose to rest here; to do the Rubens's; and to proceed to Cologne to-morrow. Horace, call Finch and Bowman; and your courier, if he will have the condescension to wait upon ME, will perhaps look to the baggage."
Happily Lord Rothie was at some little distance talking to a priest about one of Rubens's pictures. I slipped unseen behind the nearest pillar, and then flew from the church. How I got to the hotel I do not know, but I did reach it. 'Lady Janet, was all I could say. The waiter knew the name, and led me to her room. I threw myself on my knees, and begged her to save me.
"Is that your mother sitting there?" asked Eyebright catching a glimpse of a woman and a baby under a tree not far off. "Oh, dear, no! That's Mrs. Waurigan. She's Jenny's mother, you know, and 'Mandy's and Peter Paul Rubens's. She's not our mother at all. My mother's name is Mrs. Brown, and my papa is Dr. Azariah P. Brown. We live in New York city. Did you ever see New York city?" "No, never.
I am told that he and the painter-friend who accompanied him were so purely devoted to the mediæval aspect of all they saw, that, in walking through the galleries, they turned away their heads in approaching modern pictures, and carefully closed their eyes while they were passing Rubens's "Descent from the Cross."
The Rubens family went to live in Cologne, where the father found his learning of great use to him, and he was honoured by being made legal adviser to Anne of Saxony who was William the Silent's second queen. John Rubens's behaviour was not entirely honourable and before long he was thrown into prison, but his good wife, Maria Pypelincx undertook to free him.
An intimate friend of Van Dyck, Kenelm Digby, says that Van Dyck's first relations with Rubens came about by Van Dyck being employed to make engravings for the reproduction of Rubens's great works. After that he studied painting with him.
And the spire looks as I expected that of Strasbourg would. As to the grammarye of bells and chimes, I deliver that over to Charlie. But I have seen Rubens's painting! Before I came to Europe, Longfellow said to me, "You must go to Antwerp, to see Rubens." "I do not think I shall like Rubens," was my reply. "But you will, though. Yet never judge till you have been to Antwerp."
The texture of the Paul Veronese was not wool or cotton, but stuff, jewels, flesh, marble, air, whatever composed the essence of the varied subjects, in endless relief and truth of handling. If the Fleming had seen his two allegories hanging where they did, he would, without a question, have wished them far enough. I imagine that Rubens's landscapes are picturesque: Claude's are ideal.
Have you heard of what he has done for the French Court? Prodigious! I can't look at Rubens's pictures without fancying I see that handsome figure swaggering before the canvas. And Hans Hemmelinck at Bruges? Have you never seen that dear old hospital of St. John, on passing the gate of which you enter into the fifteenth century?
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