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We think it lucky for the Marquis that he had left Antwerp before he called Rubens a Dutch painter. We are afraid that he would have hazarded a summary application of the Lynch law of the Flemish avengers of their country.
Rubens's piety has always struck us as of this sort. If he takes a pious subject, it is to show you in what a fine way he, Peter Paul Rubens, can treat it. He never seems to doubt but that he is doing it a great honor.
Two rooms, of old German and Dutch masters, are curious, as exhibiting the upward struggles of art. Many of the pictures are hard as a tavern sign, and as ill drawn; but they mark the era of dawning effort. Then a long corridor of Dutch paintings, in which Rubens figures conspicuously, displaying, as usual, all manner of scarlet abominations, mixed with most triumphant successes.
At the age of twenty, Vandyck set out for Italy, but delayed some time at Brussels, fascinated by the charms of a peasant girl of Saveltheim, named Anna van Ophem, who persuaded him to paint two pictures for the church of her native place a St. Martin on horseback, painted from himself and the horse given him by Rubens; and a Holy Family, for which the girl and her parents were the models.
He caught her meaning; he knew that Rubes was the homely abbreviation of Rubens that all the Netherlanders used, and he guessed the idea that was reality to this little lonely fanciful mind. "Perhaps I do," he answered her with a smile, for it was not worth his while to disabuse her thoughts of any imagination that glorified him to her. "Do you not want to see Rubes' world, little one?
Danger to foreigners. Coronation of the new Pope. Pleasant experience. Cause of the revolution a mystery. Bloody plot foiled. Plans to leave for Florence. Sends casts, etc., to National Academy of Design. Leaves Rome. Dangers of the journey. Florence. Description of meeting Prince Radziwill in Coliseum at Rome. Copies portraits of Rubens and Titian in Florence. Leaves Florence for Venice.
James McNeil Whistler has said, "There may be a doubt about Rubens having been a Great Artist; but he surely was an Industrious Person." There is barely enough truth in Mr. Whistler's remark, taken with its dash of wit, to save it; but Philip Gilbert Hamerton's sober estimate is of more value: "The influence of Rubens for good can not be overestimated.
But there is no truth in it, since the picture was hung up in the Cathedral before Vandyck entered the studio of Rubens." "I suppose these people like to tell good stories, whether true or not." "Yes; and you will find a man up in this steeple who believes that his spire is the tallest in the world," added Dr. Winstock.
But Rubens had a wife of his own, to whom he was fondly attached; and this wife was also the close and trusted friend of the woman whose husband was off to the wars. And yet when this dense and silent man came back from one of his expeditions, it was only publicly to affront and disgrace his wife, and to cast Jan Rubens into a dungeon.
Then Aunt Maria brought me the hot wine and water flavoured with sleep-giving cloves, and Nurse folded my clothes, and tucked me up, and left me, with the friendly reflection of the lamps without to keep me company. I do not think I had really been to sleep, but I believe I was dozing, when I fancied that I heard the familiar sound of Rubens lapping water from the toilette jug in my room at home.
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