This intriguing book draws for the first time a complete picture of the artistic and political connections between Rubens and the Stuart court. Fiona Donovan examines the works the great Flemish artist created for English patrons, his relationships with English courtiers beginning in 1616, and his nine-month diplomatic mission to London in 1629–30. She focuses particular attention on the series of nine canvases that Rubens painted for the Banqueting House ceiling of Whitehall Palace—a project that is considered by many to be the most significant work of art ever commissioned by the English Crown. Rubens’s iconographic scheme for the Whitehall ceiling presented English courtiers with a complex pictorial language not seen before in Great Britain. Donovan explores the artist’s allegorical imagery and provides fresh insights into the role the work of Rubens and continental culture played in politics and society at the court of Charles I.

Flemish artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was one of the most internationally admired painters in seventeenth-century Europe, whose patrons included the rulers of France, Spain, Mantua and the Netherlands. Demonstrating Rubens' fluidity and freedom of invention, this work exemplifies his role as diplomatic envoy to Britain.

The first study devoted to classical art’s vital creative impact on the work of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. For the great Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the classical past afforded lifelong creative stimulus and the camaraderie of humanist friends. A formidable scholar, Rubens ingeniously transmitted the physical ideals of ancient sculptors, visualized the spectacle of imperial occasions, rendered the intricacies of mythological tales, and delineated the character of gods and heroes in his drawings, paintings, and designs for tapestries. His passion for antiquity profoundly informed every aspect of his art and life. Including 170 color illustrations, this volume addresses the creative impact of Rubens’s remarkable knowledge of the art and literature of antiquity through the consideration of key themes. The book’s lively interpretive essays explore the formal and thematic relationships between ancient sources and Baroque expressions: the significance of neo-Stoic philosophy, the compositional and iconographic inspiration provided by exquisite carved gems, Rubens’s study of Roman marble sculpture, and his inventive translation of ancient sources into new subjects made vivid by his dynamic painting style. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa from November 10, 2021, to January 24, 2022.

A generous selection of Rubens' best drawings, chiefly portraits and religious and mythical scenes, that fully reveal his supreme artistic gifts. Publisher's note.

A study of the relationship between Rubens and his Spanish patrons.

Oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens—created at speed and in the heat of invention with a colorful loaded brush—convey all the spontaneity of the great Flemish painter’s creative process. This ravishing book draws from both private and public collections to present in full color 40 of Rubens’s oil sketches. Viewers will find in these informal paintings an enchanting intimacy and gain a new appreciation of Rubens’s capacity for invention and improvisation, and of his special genius for dramatic design and coloristic brilliance. The book investigates the role of the oil sketch in Rubens’s work; the development of the artist’s themes and narratives in his multiple sketches; and the history of the appreciation of his oil sketches. It also explores some of the unique aspects of his techniques and materials. By revealing the oil sketches as the most direct record of Rubens’s creative process, the book presents him as the greatest and most fluent practitioner of this vibrant and vital medium.

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens's paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist's best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens's lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.

Rubens is undoubtedly the most influential Flemish painter. Through reproductions in print, his compositions had an immense impact, even during his lifetime. Himself indebted to Titian, Rubens became a role model to Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Velázquez, and influenced artists well beyond his time, including figures such as Cézanne, Picasso, Bacon and Freud. This stunning new volume explores Rubens's legacy thematically, through a series of sections devoted to Violence, Power, Lust, Compassion, Elegance and Poetry. Illustrating some of the artists' most famous paintings alongside great works that bear his influence, each section will link artists across the centuries in their references to Rubens, from Van Dyck and Watteau to Manet, Daumier, Renoir and Van Gogh, as well as Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. AUTHOR: Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Arturo Galansino is curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Gerlinde Gruber is curator for Flemish Baroque paintings at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Nico van Hout is a member of the collections research team at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. David Howarth is professor of history of art at the University of Edinburgh. Alexis Merle du Bourg is an art historian and a Rubens specialist. SELLING POINTS: * Rubens is internationally recognised as one of the most influential artists of all time * This book explores the important themes he addressed in his art, and the great sway his work held over later artists 216 colour

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist’s approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600–08), this volume highlights Rubens’s high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters – the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing – a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles. Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens’s early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens’s Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens’s commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens’s intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.