writer : jotsna jari
“Painting a young maiden is similar to cavorting with great abandon. It is the finest refreshment.” – Peter Paul Rubens
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💚 Peter Paul Rubens 🔼
(Dutch: 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640)
He was a Flemish artist and diplomat.
He is considered the most influential artist of Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens’s highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history.
His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation.
Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was also a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of Frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp.
Alongside Raphael, Rubens was pivotal in establishing the concept of a thriving artist’s studio into the art lexicon. His large studio in Antwerp was a production hub for paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe. His bustling workshop employed many artists and apprentices who would help accomplish a large and prolific volume of work.
About thirty-two years old, the artist presented himself dressed in chivalric elegance while Isabella, age eighteen, wears a luxurious, richly embroidered dress of heavy wine-colored taffeta silk, an enormous ruff, and a high-crowned hat.
They pose here as a respected couple in Flemish middle-class life, perhaps in their inner open air courtyard where Isabella planted gardens of flowers, herbs and vegetables.
Rubens designed the stone benches, brought in Classical busts on pedestals, Doric and Corinthian columns, statues, and small fountains.
They are sitting in the shade, hand-in-hand, as they lean toward each other but gaze politely toward the viewer. They are surrounded by symbols of love and marriage: the honeysuckle bushes and garden are both traditional symbols of love while the holding of right hands represents union through marriage. The gentle, conservative and loving approach to the painting reflects the intimacy of the occasion.
Rubens’ biographer Kristen Lohse Belkin called this piece “…one of his most delightful pictures…” She also noted that this painting is much larger, almost 5 feet by 4.5 feet, than previous portrayals of married couples with the figures shown in half-length poses.
The 19th-century French Romantic
painter Eugene Delacroix wrote that Rubens “carries one beyond the limit scarcely attained by the most eminent painters; he dominates one, he overpowers one, with all his liberty and boldness.”
Artist- Peter Paul Rubens
Year- 1610
Medium- Oil on canvas
Movement- Flemish Baroque
Subject- Massacre of the Innocents
Dimensions- 142 cm × 183 cm × 1.9 cm (56 in × 72 in × 0.75 in)
Weight- 93.9 kilograms (207 lb)
LocationArt Gallery of Ontario, TorontoAccession2014/1581
Art Market :-
At a Sotheby’s auction on 10 July 2002, Rubens’s painting Massacre of the Innocents, rediscovered not long before, sold for £49.5 million (US$76.2 million) to Lord Thomson.
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