Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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Annibale Carracci was one of the first who practised landscape painting
and genre pictures, such as 'The Greedy Eater,' as separate branches of
art. Two of Annibale's landscapes are in the National Gallery.

Guido Reni, commonly called 'Guido,' was born at Bologna, 1575. His
father was a musician, and Guido was intended for the same calling, but
finally became a painter and student in the school of the Carracci. He
followed Annibale Carracci to Rome, and dwelt there for twenty years. He
obtained great repute and favour, but taking offence at some supposed
injustice, he left Rome, and settled at last in Bologna, where he
established a large school. Though he made great sums of money, which
might have enabled him to live in the splendour which he coveted, on
account of his addiction to gambling and his grossly extravagant habits,
he was constantly in debt, and driven to tax his genius to the utmost,
and to sell its fruits for what they would bring, irrespective of what
he owed to himself, his art, and to the giver of all good gifts. He died
at Bologna, and was buried with much pomp in the church of San Dominico,
1642.

Of Guido we hear that he had three styles: the first, after the vigorous
manner of Michael Angelo; the second, in the prevailing ornamental taste
of the Rome of his day and the Carracci. This is considered Guido's best
style, and is distinguished by its subtle management of light and shade.
His third, which is called his 'silvery style,' from its greys,
degenerated into insipidity, with little wonder, seeing that at this
stage he sold his time at so much per hour to picture-dealers, who stood
over him, watch in hand, to see that he fulfilled his bargain, and
carried away the saints he manufactured wet from the easel. Such
manufactory took him only three hours, sometimes less. His charges had
risen from five guineas for a head, and twenty guineas for a whole
figure, to twenty times that amount. He painted few portraits, but many
'fancy' heads of saints. Nearly three hundred pictures by Guido are
believed to be in existence. Guido's individual distinction was his
refined sense of beauty, but it was over-ruled by 'cold calculation,'
and developed into a mere abstract conception of 'empty grace' without
heart or soul.

His finest work is the large painting of 'Phoebus and Aurora' in a
pavilion of the Rospigliosi Palace at Rome. In our National Gallery
there are nine specimens of Guido's works, including one of his best
'Ecce Homos,' which belonged to the collection of Samuel Rogers.

Domenico Zampieri, commonly called Domenichino, was another Bolognese
painter, and another eminent scholar of the Carracci. He was born in
1581, and, after studying under a Flemish painter, passed into the
school of the Carracci. While yet a very young man, Domenichino was
invited to Rome, where he soon earned a high reputation, competing
successfully with his former fellow-scholar, Guido. Domenichino's
'Flagellation of St Andrew,' and 'Communion of St Jerome,' in payment of
which he only received about five guineas; his 'Martyrdom of St
Sebastian,' and his 'Four Evangelists,' which are among his
masterpieces, were all painted in Rome, and remain in Rome.

Domenichino is said to have excited the extreme hostility of rival
painters, and to have suffered especially from the malice of the
Neapolitans, when he was invited to work among them. After a cruel
struggle Domenichino died in Naples, not without a horrible suspicion of
having being poisoned, at the age of sixty, in 1641. One of his
enemies--a Roman on this occasion--destroyed what was left of
Domenichino's work in Naples.

The painter's fate was a miserable one, and by a coincidence between his
fortune and his taste in subjects, he has identified his name with
terrible representations of martyrdoms. Kugler writes that martyrdom as
a subject for painting, which had been sparingly used by Raphael and his
scholars, had come into fashion in Domenichino's time, for 'painters and
poets sought for passionate emotion, and these subjects (martyrdoms)
supplied them with plentiful food.' Sensationalism is the florid hectic
of art's decay, whether in painting or in literature.

Domenichino is accredited with more taste than fancy. He made free use
of the compositions of even contemporary artists, while he
individualized these compositions. His good and bad qualities are those
of his school, already quoted, and perhaps it is in keeping with these
qualities that the excellence of Domenichino's works lies in subordinate
parts and subordinate characters. There are examples of Domenichino in
the National Gallery.

I shall close my long list of the great Italian painters of the past
with one who was quite apart from and opposed to the Carracci school,
and whose triumphs and failures were essentially his own. Salvator Rosa,
born in 1615 near Naples, was the son of an architect. In opposition to
his father Salvator Rosa became a painter. Having succeeded in selling
his sketches to a celebrated buyer, the bold young Neapolitan started
for Rome at the age of twenty years; and Rome, 'the Jerusalem of
Painters,' became thenceforth Salvator Rosa's head-quarters, though the
character of the man was such as to force him to change his quarters not
once or twice only in his life, and thus he stayed some time, in turn,
at Naples, Viterbo, Volterra, and Florence. At Volterra the aggressive
nature of the painter broke forth in a series of written satires on a
medley of subjects--music, poetry (both of which Salvator himself
cultivated), painting, war, Babylon, and envy. These incongruous satires
excited the violent indignation of the individuals against whom
Salvator's wit was aimed, and their efforts at revenge, together with
his own turbulent spirit, drove him from place to place.

Salvator Rosa was at Naples 1647, and took part in the riots, so famous
in song and story, which made Masaniello, the young fisherman, for a
time Captain-General and Master of Naples, when it was, according to
law, a Spanish dependency governed by a viceroy. Salvator was in the
Compagnia della Morte commanded by Falcone, a battle painter, during the
troubles, a wild enough post to please the wild painter, even had he not
been in addition a personal adherent of the ruling spirit Masaniello,
whom Salvator Rosa painted more than once. After so eventful a life,
the painter died peaceably enough in his fifty-ninth year, of dropsy, at
Rome, and left a considerable fortune to his only son.

Salvator Rosa was the incarnation of the arrogant, fickle, fierce
Neapolitan spirit, and he carried it out sufficiently in an
undisciplined, stormy life, without the addition of the popular legend
that he had at one time joined a troop of banditti, and indulged in
their excesses. The legend seems to have a familiarity with mountain
passes, and his love of peopling them appropriately with banditti in
action. Salvator Rosa was a dashing battle painter, a mediocre
historical painter, and an excellent portrait painter as well as
landscape painter. But it is chiefly by the savage grandeur of his
mountain or forest landscapes, with their fitting _dramatis personae_,
that he has won his renown. Mr Ruskin, while he allows Salvator's gift
of imagination, denounces him for the reckless carelessness and
untruthfulness to nature of his painting. Many of Salvator Rosa's
pictures are in the Pitti Palace in Florence, and many are in England.




CHAPTER VIII.

RUBENS, 1577-1640--REMBRANDT, 1606 OR 1608-1669--TENIERS, FATHER AND
SON, 1582-1694--WOUVERMAN, 1620-1668--CUYP, 1605; STILL LIVING,
1638--PAUL POTTER, 1625-1654--CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630.


A long interval elapsed between the Van Eycks and Quintin Matsys, and
Rubens; but if Flemish art was slow of growth and was only developed
after long pauses, it made up for its slowness and delays by the burst
of triumph into which Flemish and Dutch art broke forth in Rubens and
his school, in Rembrandt and Cuyp and Ruysdael.

Peter Paul Rubens was born at Siegen in Westphalia, on the day of St
Peter and St Paul, 1577. But though Rubens was born out of Antwerp, he
was a citizen of Antwerp by descent as well as by so many later
associations. His father, John Rubens, a lawyer, an imprudent,
thriftless man in character and habits, had been compelled to leave
Antwerp in consequence of religious disturbances which broke out there
about the time that the northern provinces, more at one and more decided
in their union than the southern provinces, established their
independence. Rubens spent his early boyhood at Cologne, but on the
death of his father when he was ten years of age, his mother, a good and
'discreet' woman, to whom the painter owed much, and confessed his debt,
returned with her family to Antwerp. His mother had destined him for his
father's profession, but did not oppose her son's preference for art.

After studying under two different artists, and becoming a master in the
guild of St Luke, Rubens went to Italy in 1600, when he was a young man
of three-and-twenty years of age. He was eight years absent, entering
the service of the ducal sovereign of Mantua, being sent by him on a
diplomatic mission to Madrid to Philip III, of Spain, visiting on his
own account Rome, where he found the Carracci and Guido[22] at the
height of their fame, Venice and Genoa, 'leaving portraits where he
went.'

With Genoa, its architecture, and its situation, Rubens was specially
charmed, but he quitted it in haste, being summoned home to attend the
death-bed of his mother, from whom he had parted eight years before; and
arriving too late to see her in life. A man of strong feelings in sorrow
as in joy, he withdrew into retirement, and resided for his season of
mourning in a religious house.

Loving Italy with a painter's enthusiasm, so that to the latest day of
his life he generally wrote in Italian, and loved to sign his name
'Pietro Paolo Rubens,' he had intended to return and settle in Mantua,
but having been named court painter to the Governess of the Netherlands,
Clara Eugenia, and her husband Albert, Rubens had sufficient patriotism
and sufficient worldly foresight to induce him to relinquish his idea,
and establish himself in his native Antwerp. He was already a man of
eminence in his profession, and a man of mark out of it. Go where he
would he made friends, and he so recommended himself to his royal
patrons by his natural suavity, tact, and sagacity, that he was not only
in the utmost favour with them as a right courtly painter, but was
employed by them, once and again, on delicate, difficult, private
embassies. But it was not only to his patrons that Rubens was endeared,
he was emphatically what men call 'a good fellow,' alike to superiors,
equals, and inferiors; a frank, honest, bountiful, and generous man. His
love of courts and their splendour was the chivalrous homage which a man
of his cast of mind paid to the dignity and picturesqueness of high
estate.

He married a year after his mother's death, when he was in his
thirty-third year. His first wife, Isabella Brant, was a connection of
his own (and so was his second wife). He built and painted, in fresco, a
fine house in Antwerp, and laid out a pleasant garden, which contained a
rotunda, filled with his collection of pictures by the Italian masters,
antique gems, etc. etc., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep
house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain
friends--above all, to paint with might and main in company with his
great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where
Raphael was concerned, were, for the most part, Rubens' devoted
comrades. Counting his work not only as the great object, but the great
zest of his life, never did painter receive such sweeping and
accumulating commissions, and never, even by Tintoret, were commissions
executed with such undaunted, unhesitating expedition.

Withal Rubens frequently left his studio and went abroad, either to act
as an unofficial ambassador, or to paint at the special request of some
foreign sovereign. Thus he was residing in Paris in 1620, planning for
Marie de Medici the series of remarkable pictures which commemorated her
marriage with Henry IV. (When I was a little girl, I went occasionally
to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there
were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet
looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste
that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal
personages, high church dignitaries, patron saints, and gods and
goddesses.) In 1628 Rubens was in Spain on a mission from his sovereign
to her kinsman, Philip IV.; in the following year he was in England, on
a service of a similar description to Charles I., from whom, even as
Rubens had already received it from King Philip, the painter had the
honour of knighthood.

In the mean time Rubens' first wife died, after a union of seventeen
years, in 1626; and four years later, in 1630, the painter, when he was
a man of fifty years, re-married another connection of his own, Helena
Fourment, a girl only in her sixteenth year. Both of his wives were
handsome, fair, full-formed Flemish beauties. Elizabeth (in Spanish,
Isabella) Brant's beauty was of a finer order than that of her
successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on
Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been
affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of
no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the
greater world without, as are the faces of these two women, and above
all, that of Helena Fourment. He had seven children, who frequently
figure in their mothers' portraits. He has left notable portraits of his
two sons by his first wife, of his eldest daughter, Clara Eugenia, when
eight years of age, and of his daughter Elizabeth, a buxom baby, dressed
in velvet and point lace, playing with toys.

After a life of unbroken success and the highest honours, the last
distinction conferred on Rubens was, that he was chosen to arrange the
gala, and to be the right-hand man who should conduct the Cardinal
Infant, the successor of Clara Eugenia, on his first entrance into
Antwerp. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he
could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had
been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of
sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time
of his death, and only a part of his collection, which was then sold,
brought so large a sum in those days, as twenty thousand pounds. Rubens'
second wife, Helena Fourment, to whom he had been married ten years,
survived him, a widow at twenty-six years of age Rubens' portrait is
even better known than those of his wives, for, as I have said of
Raphael in his popularity, Rubens in his life is the beau-ideal of a
painter to the many. The portrait is worthy of the man, with something
gallant in the manliness, and with thought tempering what might have
been too much of bravado and too much of debonnairete in the traits. His
features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with
hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is
turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the
portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The great flapping hat, worn
alike by men and women, slightly cocked to one side, is the perfection
of picturesque head gear. Equally picturesque, and not in the slightest
degree effeminate on a man like Rubens, is the falling collar of pointed
mechlin, just seen above the cloak draped in large folds.

In his own day Rubens was without a rival as a painter. In a much later
day Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced Rubens 'perhaps the greatest master
in the mechanical part of the art, _the best workman with his tools_
that ever exercised a pencil.' His consummate excellence lay in his
execution and colouring. It is brought as a reproach against his
painting, that his noblest characters, even his sacred characters, were
but big, brawny, red and white Flemings. His imagination only reached a
certain height, and yet, if it were a very earthly Flemish imagination,
it could be grandly, as it was always vigorously, earthly and Flemish.
At the same time he could be deficient where proportion, and even where
all the laws of art, are concerned.

It is right that I should, with regret and shame, say this of Rubens,
whose geniality bordered on joviality, and whose age was a grosser age
than our own, that he debased his genius by some foul and revolting
pictures.

Of the general distinction between Rubens and some of his predecessors I
should like to quote Mr Ruskin's passage in his defence:

'A man long trained to love the monk's vision of Fra Angelico,
turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of
Rubens, which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But
is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that, while
Angelico prayed and wept in his _olive shade_, there was
different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:--wild seas
to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless
marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the
frosty clay; careful breeding of the stout horses and cattle;
close setting of brick-walls against cold winds and snow; much
hardening of hands, and gross stoutening of bodies in all this;
gross jovialities of harvest homes, and Christmas feasts, which
were to be the reward of it; rough affections, and sluggish
imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod humanities, but
humanities still,--humanities which God had his eye upon, and
which won perhaps, here and there, as much favour in His sight
as the wasted aspects of the whispering monks of Florence
(Heaven forbid that it should not be so, since the most of us
cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and reapers still). And
are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens' masculine and
universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human
rendering of it, gentleman though he was by birth, and feeling,
and education, and place, and, when he chose, lordly in
conception also? He had his faults--perhaps great and lamentable
faults,--though more those of his time and his country than his
own; he has neither cloister-breeding nor boudoir-breeding, and
is very unfit to paint either in missals or annuals; but he has
an open sky and wide-world breeding in him that we may not be
offended with, fit alike for king's court, knight's camp, or
peasants cottage.'

Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches
being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp,
many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and
cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at
Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of
Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a
very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his
own.

First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group,
distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard
to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in
relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An
enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the
daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for
composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the
bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely
physical agony--too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime--- an
earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'

'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare;
Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow
Stream not with blood.'

There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while
Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by
re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the
Magdalene.

With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of
the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen
hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.

'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the
Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in
her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of
light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing
beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre
over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful
combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the
child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his
tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin
with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with
impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'

'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects
from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and
in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among
his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,'
now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river
Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is
torn from her horse; a second is dragged along by a sable steed, and
falling headlong into the river, where others are swimming and
struggling. No other battle-piece, save that of the Amazons, can compare
with Raphael's "Battle of Constantine."'

Another great picture is The 'Carrying off of Proserpine.' 'Pluto in his
car is driven by fiery brown steeds, and is bearing away the goddess,
resisting and struggling. The picture absolutely glows with genial fire.
The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the
companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is conspicuous for grace
and beauty. The victorious god of love hovers before the chariot, and
the blue ocean, warmly tinted with the sunbeams, forms a splendid
back-ground.'[23]

Rubens was famous for the loveliness and grace of his paintings of
children. Perhaps the most beautiful is that of 'The Infant Jesus and
John playing with a Lamb.'

Rubens was a great animal painter. One of his celebrated animal pictures
is 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' now at Hamilton Palace, in which each
lion is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest have been painted by
Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which had been circulated
that he could not paint animals, and that those in his pictures were
supplied by the animal-painter, his friend and scholar, Schneyders.

Rubens' landscapes are not the least renowned of his pictures. He gave
to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and
matchless aerial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of
nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most
ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man
of genius would pass by. His 'Prairie of Laacken,' 'with the sun of
Flanders piercing the dense yellow clouds with the force of fire,' is of
great repute.

Among his famous portraits I shall mention that called 'The Four
Philosophers' (Justus Lepsius, Hugo Grotius, Rubens, and his brother),
with peaked beards and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and
fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as
accessories. The open pillared door is wreathed with a spray from
without, and there is a landscape in the background. This portrait is
full of power, freedom, and splendid painting.

Another portrait contains that sweetest of Rubens' not often sweet
faces, called 'the Lady in the Straw Hat.' Rubens himself did not name
the picture otherwise in his catalogue. Tradition says the original was
Mdlle Lundens, the beauty of the seventeen provinces, and that she died
young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the
triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much
in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture
must speak for itself, in its graceful, tender beauty. Forming part of
the collection of the late Sir Robert Peel (I think he gave three
thousand pounds for 'the Lady in the Straw Hat'), which has been bought
for the country, this beautiful portrait is now in the National Gallery.

And now I must speak of the picture of the Arundel Family. But first, a
word about Thomas, Earl of Arundel. It is impossible to write an English
work on art and omit a brief account of one of England's greatest art
benefactors. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, representing in his day the great
house of Howard, had a love of art which approached to a mania; and
without being so outrageously vain as Sir Kenelm Digby, there is no
doubt that the Earl counted on his art collection as a source of
personal distinction. James I., himself an art collector, so far
humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's
forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and
the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them.
The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit,
employed agents and ambassadors--notably Petty and Evelyn--all over
Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems,
etc., etc. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his
priceless collection for safety to Antwerp and Padua. Eventually it was
divided among his sons and scattered far and wide. The only portion of
it which fell to the nation, in the course of another generation, was
the Greek Marbles, known as the Arundel Marbles, which were finally
presented to the University of Oxford. But in Rubens' day all this grand
collection was intact, and displayed in galleries at Arundel House,
which the mob thought fit to nickname 'Tart Hall;' and through these
galleries Rubens was conducted by the Earl.

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