Peter Paul Rubens

John Lothrop Motley, author of the "Dutch Republic," writes, in a letter from Brussels, 1853, quoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his Memoirs of Motley,--

"There are a few good Rubenses here, but the great wealth of that master is in Antwerp. The great picture of the 'Descent from the Cross' is free again, after having been ten years in the repairing-room.

"It has come out in good condition. What a picture! It seems to me as if I had really stood at the cross, and had seen Mary weeping on John's shoulder, and Magdalen receiving the dead body of the Saviour in her arms. Never was the grand tragedy represented in so profound and dramatic a manner. For it is not only in his color, in which this man so easily surpasses all the world, but in his life-like, flesh-and-blood action,--the tragic power of his composition.... Well might Guido exclaim, 'The fellow mixes blood with his colors!' ... I defy any one of the average amount of imagination and sentiment, to stand long before the 'Descent from the Cross' without being moved more nearly to tears than he would care to acknowledge."

This is high praise, both for the master and his masterpiece; but this is only one of eighteen hundred finished paintings by Rubens. His gorgeous coloring has always been the chief characteristic of his school. There are twelve hundred engravings of his works. His two most famous pictures, the "Raising of the Cross" and the "Descent from the Cross," are in the Antwerp Cathedral; and many of his choice works are in the academy of the same town.

This famous painter was born at Cologne, Germany, June 29, 1577, and died at Antwerp, May 30, 1640. Lubke says of him,--

"He was one of the most brilliant, accomplished, and versatile geniuses in the whole history of art....Soon the fame of his great ability spread all over the world; and the courts of Spain, France, and England heaped commissions and honors upon him."

In 1620 Marie de' Medici invited him to France, and he executed many great works for her. In the Louvre are twenty-one paintings, representing, allegorically, the history of Marie de' Medici. He also painted some brilliant genre pictures (q.v.), such as the "Peasant's Dance" in the Louvre.

The most of his paintings are large, and crowded with figures. Some of them are of colossal size, and may be seen in the various churches of his country, and in nearly all the galleries and museums of Europe. Lubke says, again,--

"Besides all this, Rubens was an architect; and, in addition to all these occupations as an artist, he was a man prominent in the higher social life of his day,--the associate of princes and diplomates,--and often, even, as has been said before, intrusted with political missions to foreign courts. Thus, in him, more than in any other contemporary master, do we find united all the richness and splendor of the life of that brilliant age."

He was named Peter Paul, because his birthday was the feast of Saints Peter and Paul.