Rubens painted Europe's courts and negotiated their treaties
Sir Peter Paul Rubens, 28 June 1577 to 30 May 1640, ran Antwerp's most powerful Baroque workshop while serving as a knighted diplomat for Spain and England. Movement, color, and Counter-Reformation drama made his altarpieces and mythologies the template collectors chased across Europe.
Rubens was born in exile because of a scandal. His father Jan, a lawyer with a doctorate from Rome and a former Antwerp alderman, converted to Calvinism and fled the Spanish crackdown after the iconoclastic riots of 1566. In Cologne he became legal adviser to Anna of Saxony, wife of William of Orange, and fathered a daughter with her in 1571. Jailed at Dillenburg Castle under threat of execution, he was freed after two years on a bail of 6,000 thalers, barred from practising law and confined to Siegen, where Peter Paul was born in 1577.
After Jan died in 1587 the family returned to Antwerp, where the boys studied Latin and classics at Rombout Verdonck's school; a classmate, Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin publishing house, became a lifelong friend. Peter Paul served briefly as a page to the Countess de Ligne-Arenberg but had long copied prints by Holbein and Stimmer, and he trained successively with Tobias Verhaecht, Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. Van Noort and van Veen had both studied in Italy, and van Veen, a court painter to the archdukes, taught him the ideal of the learned painter.
The mature Rubens ran a large Antwerp workshop producing altarpieces, mythologies, hunts, portraits and late landscapes for collectors across Europe; Michael Jaffé's catalogue lists 1,403 works, not counting studio copies. He designed tapestries, prints, his own house and the decorations for Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand's entry into Antwerp in 1635, and his 1622 book on the palaces of Genoa spread that style northward. He kept painting on wooden panels even at huge scale, used canvas for works travelling far and slate to cut glare on altarpieces, and received knighthoods from the kings of both Spain and England.
Source: Peter Paul Rubens
