Rubens In The Museo Del Prado (English)

Rubens was a very prolific artist and, even though he focused on painting, he also designed plenty of prints, tapestries, architecture, sculptures and decorative objects.

Philip IV, guided by his niece Isabella Clara Eugenia, sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands in the Low Countries, was one of the greatest collectors of the Flemish artist’s works, to the extent that in the public auction after Rubens’ death, he acquired most part of the artist’s private collection of paintings.

Rubens married twice. His first wife was Isabella Brant, who he married in 1609, but she died in 1626. In 1630, when he was 60, he married Hélène Fourment, a 16 year-old beauty, who would become Rubens’ main source of inspiration during his last decade. Not only did he paint portraits of her and modelled some characters in his paintings after her, but he also took from her the features that would characterise the feminine canon that appears in most of his artworks at that time. We can see an example of all this in “The three Graces” (figure on the left) or in “The Judgement of Paris” (depicted as Venus).

This series, painted little after coming back from an eight-year stay in Italy, is inspired by the Classical sculpture and by Michelangelo’s and Caravaggio’s art. Rubens, an important creator of devout pictures that exalt the Catholic doctrine, enhances here the idea of sacrifice and dedication of these characters, as he portrays them with the tools used in their martyrdom.

Rubens’ workshop became the most important one in Antwerp, hosting a large number of artists and apprentices. Van Dyck was one of them. In 1620, only a few years after his debut in the workshop, he was already the principal assistant.

Throughout his career, Rubens made many artworks in collaboration with Flemish artists, Frans Snyders and Jan Bureghel the Elder being some of the most outstanding. The Museo del Prado houses some of these collaborative pieces, such as “Sight” (1617), comprised in the set of paintings on the five senses made together by Rubens and Jan Brueghel.

Rubens visited the Spanish court twice. The first visit was in 1603 as part of an ambassadorship sent in representation of the Duke of Mantua. The second one was in 1628 and this time Rubens was called by the king Philip IV himself to carry out some diplomatic issues. During this second visit, he met Velázquez, with whom he would probably share a studio in the Alcázar de Madrid and to whom he would recommend a trip to Italy.

Rubens was born on June 28th 1577 to a Flemish Calvinist family in Siegen, a German province in Westphalia, where they had fled to from Antwerp due to religious persecution.

The decoration of the Torre de la Parada, a royal hunting pavilion, was one of the biggest projects commissioned by Philip IV. It consisted of more than 70 pieces of art, depicting mythological topics most of them taken from the Metamorphoses by Ovid. For this project, in which Velázquez also collaborated, Rubens delegated the execution of some paintings to his workshop and other outstanding Flemish artists, although he designed all the sketches.

“The Triumph of the Eucharist” is the name of a series of 20 tapestries designed by Rubens in little panels painted in oils, commissioned by Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia as a gift to the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales de Madrid. The Prado preserves six of them.