Birth Year : 1577
Death Year : 1640
Country : Netherlands
Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish Baroque master, was born in Germany
while his Protestant father was in exile. Rubens did not return to his
family's native Antwerp until after his father's death in 1589. He was
then brought up as a devout Catholic and received a classical education
before studying art with three successive Flemish artists. He became a
member of the Antwerp Painters' Guild in 1598 and in 1600 left for Italy.
Except for a brief trip to Spain, he remained in Italy for eight years,
studying, traveling and working for the Duke of Mantua. It was during this
period that he absorbed and expressed the ideas and influences of Michelangelo,
Raphael, Correggio, and of his contemporaries,
the Caracci and Caravaggio,
producing religious works that already more than hinted at his later style.
Upon his return to Antwerp, he became painter to the Archduke and opened
his own studio, which was so busy that he was able to hire the best artists
of his day to work with him. By 1616, he had fully developed a personal,
dynamic style characterized by narrative action, simplicity of figure,
and bold, dramatic plasticity and lighting. As spokesman for the Catholic
Counter Reformation, Rubens painted many religious works for various churches
and cathedrals during this period. The years 1614-22 were marked by great
self-assurance, increased fluidity in his work, and dramatic movement often
expressed in pyramids of twisting bodies. These characteristics were especially
evident in hunt and battle scenes of a mythological or historical nature.
After his first wife died in 1626, Rubens served as a diplomat in Spain
and England. The years 1622-32 were the period of his great international
commissions, such as the Medici cycle for the Luxembourg Palace; and these
years are marked by splendid pictorialism, and rapidity of technique. In
1630 Rubens married the young Hélèna Fourment, and from 1632
to the end of his life he lived in semi-retirement in his castle at Steen,
where he began to paint landscapes with renewed interest. These landscapes
were rich and warm in color and bathed in the golden glow characteristic
of Titian's work. Ruben's paintings expressed the spirit of the seventeenth
century. A dramatic, powerful and highly intelligent painter, Ruben was
endowed with magnificent creative inventiveness.
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Peter
Paul Rubens
Four
Negro Heads
Peter
Paul Rubens
Head
of a Boy
Peter
Paul Rubens
Saint
Magdalen
Peter
Paul Rubens
Three
Graces, The
Peter
Paul Rubens
Battle
of Constantine and Maxentius
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