Turning from a survey of Rubens’ life to a consideration of his art, the three divisions to which his work groups itself naturally, are very clearly seen. Up to the time of his marriage with Isabel Brandt his work may be referred to the first division, and in art it may be said that no man’s earliest pictures are of much consequence save for their promise of higher things. They do little more than mark his progress, record impressions he has received from strong personalities, and mark his own path through the influences of different schools and varied appeals, to the complete expression of himself. Rubens was never a slavish imitator, he never assumed the mantles of the men he admired, as so many great painters have done. Goya, for example, was a man whose range of thought and capacity for receiving impressions were so great that he has painted after the manner of half-a-dozen masters, and there are pictures to be seen in Madrid to-day that are painted with Goya’s brush and recall Fragonard. Such instances may be multiplied, and Rubens is to be admired for the restraint that marked this side of his early work.

From the time of his marriage down to the season when he became recognised on all sides as a diplomatist, let us say roughly from 1610 to 1626, we get the second period, and to this may be referred the greater part of the work that has given offence—the presentation of the coarsest types of men and women in a state of nature—the treatment of some of the grossest incidents in mythological stories in fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination.

We are justified in asking ourselves whether the extraordinary development of the painter’s social and political life did not avail to arrest in late middle age any tendencies he might otherwise have had to express still further the coarser side of classical subjects. By the time he reached the forties, Rubens was the companion and even the trusted counsellor of princes and rulers. Such refinement as Western Europe boasted was to be met in the circles he frequented. The greatest work of the greatest masters was within his reach, and he had travelled to the point at which a man is able to select as well as to admire, at which he can distinguish clearly between the points that make for a picture’s strength and those that detract from it.

Rubens on arriving in Italy in the days when he had first taken service under the Duke of Mantua, was doubtless unduly impressed by Michel Angelo and Raphael. On no other grounds can we account for the delight that his earliest pictures manifest in the portrayal of massive and even ugly limbs. Doubtless he was influenced too by Titian, though we cannot agree that it was his admiration for the master that made him copy the King’s Titians in the Prado, for it is more probable that on this occasion he simply obeyed instructions. Moreover, Rome appealed to him more than Venice did. The wistful purity of a Bellini Madonna, the exquisite loveliness of a Bellini child or cherub, left him unmoved, but a Titian or a Tintoretto at its biggest, if not at its best, pleased him, and when he came in Rome to the works of Raphael and Michel Angelo he would seem to have looked no further for inspiration. Doubtless he heard many interesting theories of art in Rome, where, as we have said, Caravaggio, who wielded considerable influence in the art world, was among his friends. But Rubens thought out things for himself, and learned to quell his own instincts and to subdue his own faults as they were revealed to him.

Violence is perhaps the characteristic of Rubens’ early work. He has the grand manner without the grand method, his contrasts of light and shade and even of colour amuse where they do not offend, and his drawing is by no means remarkable or inspired. At best it is correct. We feel that we cannot see the wood because of the trees, that the blending has not been sufficiently skilful to bring about proportion and harmony, and that the expression of a giant form with prize-fighter’s muscles in the foreground of a canvas is sufficient to fill the painter with a delight that enables him happily to ignore the rest. It is the enthusiasm of clever youth, the youth of a man in whose veins there is enough and to spare of very healthy blood, in whose mental equipment refinement has been overlooked.

The death of his mother, the distressful plight of his favourite city, the responsibility of his commissions, his marriage and the fruits of his Italian travel brought about the second period, and started the traditions that give Antwerp a school and a name in the history of European art. The violence passes slowly from the canvases, the straining after effect that is so obvious and often so unpleasing in the earlier pictures goes with it. The chiaroscuro is more subdued and consequently more pleasing, only in the handling of colour the painter is still clumsy and heavy. Rubens, the great colourist, seems to have been born when the artist was more than forty years old.

Some of the best work of the second period is in Antwerp and Brussels, but it is to be found scattered all over Europe, and there are examples in private collections in this country. Perhaps the dominant impression that these works leave is one of certain difficulties created to be overcome. Just as the painter in his first manner revelled in his strength, so in his second period he rejoices in his skill. It was left to the later years to weld strength and skill into the service, on pictures that could stand for both and emphasise neither. Mythology continued to hold him, indeed we must never forget that Rubens lived in the age of pseudo-classicism, and is to be counted among its victims. To his second period belongs such work as the disgusting “Procession of Silenus” now in Munich, a picture in which the grossness of the theme is only rivalled by the vulgarity of the treatment. Some of Rubens’ apologists have held that this class of work was painted as a protest against vice, but such apologies are far-fetched. Rubens needs no apologist. Consider his work as a whole, and what is good dwarfs what is bad. Doubtless, had he been able in the later days to re-possess and destroy some of his more tainted pictures, he would have done so. It will be remarked by all who know Rubens’ work intimately, that throughout his life he was happier with a Venus than a Madonna, more at home with some great classical figure, than with the picture of Christ. He did not respond to Christianity in the sense that the Venetians responded to it, he could not for all his reputation have painted a Madonna as Bellini did, and there is no reason to believe that he would have cared to do so. Then again we may not forget that Rubens the artist, and Rubens the courtier, and Rubens the special envoy, were closely associated with Rubens the man of business, who would always have painted for choice the work likely to find immediate acceptance. There were times when some legend of Saint or Martyr moved him strangely, and he turned to it with a measure of inspiration not often excelled by the greatest of the Renaissance artists; but these occasions were rare, although Antwerp preserves one of the most effective results of such inspiration in the “Last Communion of St. Francis.” It may be remarked in this place that to see Rubens at his best, one must not go to the National Gallery or to the Louvre or to the Prado—Antwerp and Vienna hold some of the finest examples of his second and third manner. And we must never forget that Art is concerned with treatment, and that subject is of secondary interest to artists.

When he became recognised as a diplomatist whose services were required by Europe’s greatest potentates, Rubens had passed the meridian of life. He had known prosperity from the very earliest days, he had no occasion to paint pictures of the sort so admirably summed up by the offensive word “pot-boiler.” Kings and Queens and Emperors were offering him commissions, he was, if we may say so, on his best behaviour. He rose to the height of every great occasion. The commission that Maria de Medici gave him for her palace seems to have brought him to his third and latest manner, and from that year until death overtook him Rubens was one of the great masters of European art. If we could eliminate all the pictures of his first manner and a considerable portion of those belonging to his middle period, his claims would hardly be denied by the representatives and supporters of any school. He seems to have received added inspiration from his child wife, and there are few more delightful pictures than one to be seen in Munich in which Rubens and Helena Fourment are walking from their garden to their chÂteau. Perhaps even in the later days woman was nothing more than a thing of beauty for a man’s delight, and man was no more than a godlike animal, but a well-defined measure of refinement was always beyond their painter’s mental or artistic conceptions. It is sufficient for us that the appeal of nature came to him with great strength. The ChÂteau of Stein in our National Gallery and the Rainbow Landscape in the Wallace Collection gives sufficient evidence of this, while such a work as the Garden of Venus in the Prado suggests the limitations that were with him throughout his life. It is fair to say that in the later years they were not expressed so prominently in his work.

In this picture Rubens allows his brush to run away with him as though for sheer joy in its capacity. Perhaps his study of the Virgin is a little commonplace, a little too suggestive of the exuberance of Flanders rather than the refinement and spirituality of Nazareth. But the studies of the Holy Innocents are a delight, and make the canvas supremely attractive. It will be seen that the grouping of the children results in every possible difficulty that an artist may have to face, but that Rubens has encountered them all with sure, hard, and steady eye, in fashion worthy of Tintoretto himself.

PLATE VIII.—THE VIRGIN AND THE HOLY INNOCENTS