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Lot Essay
Sir Peter Paul Rubens was the greatest Flemish artist of the seventeenth century and counts among the most important painters in the history of Western art. In addition to painting portraits, mythological and allegorical scenes and complex religious works for Europe’s leading patrons, he was a consummate landscape painter who elevated the genre by imbuing it with a sense of poetry and emotional drama. The present painting, which is appearing on the market for the first time in more than sixty years, is one of only two Rubens landscapes in private hands and likely the final example that will come to market.
Rubens began to paint independent landscapes in the years following his return from an extended trip to Italy (1600-08). Perhaps the earliest surviving example is his Landscape with the Ruins of the Palatine, datable to circa 1614 or a few years later and today in the Louvre, Paris (fig. 1). In the ensuing decades, landscapes – around forty of which survive today – would develop into an important aspect of Rubens’s artistic production. While the landscapes painted before about 1630 tend to be large-scale compositions on panel or canvas, in the final decade of his life Rubens also produced a small group of intimately scaled, atmospheric sketches, fewer than a dozen of which are known today. If Wolfgang Adler’s suggestion that the present panel dates to circa 1630-5 is accurate (op. cit.), it may well represent one of the artist’s first forays into fluidly capturing his impressions of the local Flemish landscape.
Rubens distilled his composition to its bare essentials. A screen of willow trees anchors the left side of the composition. Tucked between the two trunks at right, a seated shepherd rests in the morning sun, his red shirt providing the only touch of local colour. His flock is indicated by a few summary strokes of gray in the meadow beyond. Several upright fence posts form an opening at lower centre and a pollarded willow provides compositional balance at right. Though largely conceived in thin washes of colour that make use of the light brown ground for tonal transitions, two thickly impastoed dashes at centre – one white and the other yellow – evoke the effect of sunlight emerging through the hazy sky. On account of its virtuoso handling, Christopher Brown aptly described the painting as a 'sparkling sketch' in the London exhibition of 1996-7 (op. cit., p. 91), while Adler similarly praised it as an ‘admirable little work’ in his entry in the Corpus Rubenianum volume on Rubens’s landscapes (op. cit., p. 158).
The impetus for such small-scale paintings can perhaps be found in part in Rubens’s purchase of Het Steen, a country estate outside Antwerp, in 1635. He may even have depicted his newly acquired estate in the background of one such sketch, the Landscape with an Avenue of Trees, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 2). Unlike the earlier large-scale landscapes, this sketch, the one in Boston and others like them seem to have been an intensely personal pursuit, one that saw the artist retain much of his output. Indeed, the Specificatie, or inventory of paintings in Rubens’s house following his death, lists no fewer than seventeen landscapes by the artist still in his possession (see J.M. Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, Princeton, 1989, nos. 84, 104-06, 108, 112, 132-37, 150, 171-73, 294). Though Rubens appears to have retained a number of these works in his lifetime, evidence suggests they equally found a receptive audience among early collectors. The Boston painting, for example, probably entered the famed Parisian collection of Éverhard Jabach (d. 1695) within a few decades of the artist’s death, while both the Landscape with a Hanged Man (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) and the Landscape with a Waggon at Sunset (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen) may have entered English collections earlier, possibly even in the artist’s lifetime: the former in the collection of Charles I of England and the latter with the Duke of Buckingham by 1635 (see Adler, op. cit., nos. 58 and 61).
The great Rubens scholar Ludwig Burchard (1886-1960) tentatively associated the present sketch with a Tobias and the Angel sold Christie’s, London, 1 November 1946, lot 117 (exh. cat. Rotterdam, under no. 57; see also Held, op. cit., I, under no. 451, citing Burchard). However, it is now rightly understood to be an independent work not intended as a preliminary study for a larger painting (exh. cat. Houston and The Hague, p. 26).
We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Nils Büttner, Chairman of the Centrum Rubenianum, for endorsing the attribution following firsthand inspection.
A note on the provenance
According to the present owner, the painting descended in the Butler family until its acquisition from Patrick John Butler by Edward and Sally Speelman. However, a handwritten note preserved in the object file at the Rubenianum in Antwerp offers an alternative possible provenance:
'[Auctioned] in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in a small sale and knocked down to Pierre Landry [after the end of the "Second World War"?]. Landry believed it to be a Rubens. [Kurt] Benedict thoroughly and with full conviction talked him out of this. Disappointed, Landry passed the picture on to the restorer and dealer-connoisseur Leegenhoek in Paris. Leegenhoek believed it was a Rubens and sold the picture to [Edward] Speelman for ca. £200.'
‘in Paris im Hotel Drouot, auf einer kleinen Vente versteigert und zugeschlagen an Pierre Landry [nach dem Ende des „zweiten Weltkrieges“?]. Landry glaubte an Rubens. Das wurde ihm von Benedict gründlich und in voller Überzeugung ausgeredet. Landry, enttäuscht, überließ das Bild dem Restaurator und Marchand-amateur Leegenhoek, in Paris. Leegenhoek glaubte an Rubens und verkaufte das Bild für ca. £200 an Speelman.'
It has thus far proven impossible to corroborate this suggestion, which, it should be noted, has never previously appeared in print, including in Adler's Corpus Rubenianum volume.
Rubens’s legacy
‘In no other branch of art is Rubens greater than in landscape.’ -John Constable
Rubens was among the most influential artists of all time, and his landscapes shaped the trajectory and approach of artists for centuries. Perhaps no later artist was more enamored of and influenced by his landscapes than the great nineteenth-century English landscapist John Constable (1776-1837). Much like his Flemish predecessor, Constable maintained a deep appreciation for the poetry of nature, reveling in the expression of atmosphere, vitality, and emotional truth. Paintings like Rubens’s afore-mentioned Landscape with a Waggon at Sunset in Rotterdam (fig. 3), painted roughly contemporaneously with the present sketch, served as inspiration for Constable’s work, including his most famous painting, The Hay Wain (fig. 4). Much like Rubens, Constable centred his composition around a cart fording a river. Both also cleverly employed a striking detail of local colour – in Rubens’s painting the driver’s red jacket and in Constable’s the horses’ red saddles – juxtaposed against the greens, blues and browns of the surrounding landscape.
Constable’s great rival for preeminence in landscape painting, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), was notoriously uncharitable about Rubens’s landscapes, though nevertheless was deeply aware of these works. Following an 1802 visit to the Louvre, Turner criticised one of Rubens’s landscapes with the statement ‘the sun ill-judged and misapplied…one continual glare of colour and absurdities when investigated by scale of Nature, but captivating’. As time wore on, Turner would eschew many of his Classicist tendencies, culminating in the highly innovative paintings produced in the latter half of his career. The consistent warmth of colour and dissolution of forms into atmospheric luminosity evident in works like Turner’s Sun Setting over a Lake of circa 1840 (fig. 5) find strong visual parallels with the present sketch.
Nineteenth-century French artists from Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863) to the Impressionists similarly took great interest in Rubens’s works. Delacroix produced nearly 100 drawings and 30 paintings copying Rubens, taking particular inspiration from his sense of colour and ‘his exaggerated and loose forms’. Similarly, Impressionist painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) made extensive study of Rubens’s works on view at the Louvre, while Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) found in Rubens a kindred spirit who relished the depiction of corpulent, often unnaturalistic, female forms.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Rubens’s influence has become a truly global phenomenon, with Western artists like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Jenny Saville (b. 1970) and Asian artists like Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) alike finding distinctive sources of inspiration in his work. Picasso’s large-scale anti-war masterpiece, Guernica of 1937 (Madrid, Museo Reina Sofia), for example, is modelled on Rubens’s Consequences of War of circa 1638-9 (Florence, Palazzo Pitti). For her part, Saville has professed ‘Whether you think you like Rubens or not, his influence runs through the pathways of paintings’. Her engagement with the artist can be seen not only in her large, fleshy nudes redolent of Rubens’s approach to the female figure but equally through her curation of the final gallery in the seminal exhibition Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne held at the Royal Academy in London in 2015.
Ai Weiwei’s appreciation for the ‘prince of painters’ is a particularly personal one. The artist’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Untitled (After Rubens), a Lego copy of Rubens’s painting of circa 1618 (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), for example, came about through his father’s love of Rubens’s ‘strong physical muscles and the nudities of those…beautiful compositions’. This ongoing dialogue between Rubens and those who follow in his footsteps is proof that great works of art resonate as strongly today as they did when they were created some 400 years ago.
Rubens began to paint independent landscapes in the years following his return from an extended trip to Italy (1600-08). Perhaps the earliest surviving example is his Landscape with the Ruins of the Palatine, datable to circa 1614 or a few years later and today in the Louvre, Paris (fig. 1). In the ensuing decades, landscapes – around forty of which survive today – would develop into an important aspect of Rubens’s artistic production. While the landscapes painted before about 1630 tend to be large-scale compositions on panel or canvas, in the final decade of his life Rubens also produced a small group of intimately scaled, atmospheric sketches, fewer than a dozen of which are known today. If Wolfgang Adler’s suggestion that the present panel dates to circa 1630-5 is accurate (op. cit.), it may well represent one of the artist’s first forays into fluidly capturing his impressions of the local Flemish landscape.
Rubens distilled his composition to its bare essentials. A screen of willow trees anchors the left side of the composition. Tucked between the two trunks at right, a seated shepherd rests in the morning sun, his red shirt providing the only touch of local colour. His flock is indicated by a few summary strokes of gray in the meadow beyond. Several upright fence posts form an opening at lower centre and a pollarded willow provides compositional balance at right. Though largely conceived in thin washes of colour that make use of the light brown ground for tonal transitions, two thickly impastoed dashes at centre – one white and the other yellow – evoke the effect of sunlight emerging through the hazy sky. On account of its virtuoso handling, Christopher Brown aptly described the painting as a 'sparkling sketch' in the London exhibition of 1996-7 (op. cit., p. 91), while Adler similarly praised it as an ‘admirable little work’ in his entry in the Corpus Rubenianum volume on Rubens’s landscapes (op. cit., p. 158).
The impetus for such small-scale paintings can perhaps be found in part in Rubens’s purchase of Het Steen, a country estate outside Antwerp, in 1635. He may even have depicted his newly acquired estate in the background of one such sketch, the Landscape with an Avenue of Trees, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig. 2). Unlike the earlier large-scale landscapes, this sketch, the one in Boston and others like them seem to have been an intensely personal pursuit, one that saw the artist retain much of his output. Indeed, the Specificatie, or inventory of paintings in Rubens’s house following his death, lists no fewer than seventeen landscapes by the artist still in his possession (see J.M. Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, Princeton, 1989, nos. 84, 104-06, 108, 112, 132-37, 150, 171-73, 294). Though Rubens appears to have retained a number of these works in his lifetime, evidence suggests they equally found a receptive audience among early collectors. The Boston painting, for example, probably entered the famed Parisian collection of Éverhard Jabach (d. 1695) within a few decades of the artist’s death, while both the Landscape with a Hanged Man (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) and the Landscape with a Waggon at Sunset (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen) may have entered English collections earlier, possibly even in the artist’s lifetime: the former in the collection of Charles I of England and the latter with the Duke of Buckingham by 1635 (see Adler, op. cit., nos. 58 and 61).
The great Rubens scholar Ludwig Burchard (1886-1960) tentatively associated the present sketch with a Tobias and the Angel sold Christie’s, London, 1 November 1946, lot 117 (exh. cat. Rotterdam, under no. 57; see also Held, op. cit., I, under no. 451, citing Burchard). However, it is now rightly understood to be an independent work not intended as a preliminary study for a larger painting (exh. cat. Houston and The Hague, p. 26).
We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Nils Büttner, Chairman of the Centrum Rubenianum, for endorsing the attribution following firsthand inspection.
A note on the provenance
According to the present owner, the painting descended in the Butler family until its acquisition from Patrick John Butler by Edward and Sally Speelman. However, a handwritten note preserved in the object file at the Rubenianum in Antwerp offers an alternative possible provenance:
'[Auctioned] in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in a small sale and knocked down to Pierre Landry [after the end of the "Second World War"?]. Landry believed it to be a Rubens. [Kurt] Benedict thoroughly and with full conviction talked him out of this. Disappointed, Landry passed the picture on to the restorer and dealer-connoisseur Leegenhoek in Paris. Leegenhoek believed it was a Rubens and sold the picture to [Edward] Speelman for ca. £200.'
‘in Paris im Hotel Drouot, auf einer kleinen Vente versteigert und zugeschlagen an Pierre Landry [nach dem Ende des „zweiten Weltkrieges“?]. Landry glaubte an Rubens. Das wurde ihm von Benedict gründlich und in voller Überzeugung ausgeredet. Landry, enttäuscht, überließ das Bild dem Restaurator und Marchand-amateur Leegenhoek, in Paris. Leegenhoek glaubte an Rubens und verkaufte das Bild für ca. £200 an Speelman.'
It has thus far proven impossible to corroborate this suggestion, which, it should be noted, has never previously appeared in print, including in Adler's Corpus Rubenianum volume.
Rubens’s legacy
‘In no other branch of art is Rubens greater than in landscape.’ -John Constable
Rubens was among the most influential artists of all time, and his landscapes shaped the trajectory and approach of artists for centuries. Perhaps no later artist was more enamored of and influenced by his landscapes than the great nineteenth-century English landscapist John Constable (1776-1837). Much like his Flemish predecessor, Constable maintained a deep appreciation for the poetry of nature, reveling in the expression of atmosphere, vitality, and emotional truth. Paintings like Rubens’s afore-mentioned Landscape with a Waggon at Sunset in Rotterdam (fig. 3), painted roughly contemporaneously with the present sketch, served as inspiration for Constable’s work, including his most famous painting, The Hay Wain (fig. 4). Much like Rubens, Constable centred his composition around a cart fording a river. Both also cleverly employed a striking detail of local colour – in Rubens’s painting the driver’s red jacket and in Constable’s the horses’ red saddles – juxtaposed against the greens, blues and browns of the surrounding landscape.
Constable’s great rival for preeminence in landscape painting, J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), was notoriously uncharitable about Rubens’s landscapes, though nevertheless was deeply aware of these works. Following an 1802 visit to the Louvre, Turner criticised one of Rubens’s landscapes with the statement ‘the sun ill-judged and misapplied…one continual glare of colour and absurdities when investigated by scale of Nature, but captivating’. As time wore on, Turner would eschew many of his Classicist tendencies, culminating in the highly innovative paintings produced in the latter half of his career. The consistent warmth of colour and dissolution of forms into atmospheric luminosity evident in works like Turner’s Sun Setting over a Lake of circa 1840 (fig. 5) find strong visual parallels with the present sketch.
Nineteenth-century French artists from Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863) to the Impressionists similarly took great interest in Rubens’s works. Delacroix produced nearly 100 drawings and 30 paintings copying Rubens, taking particular inspiration from his sense of colour and ‘his exaggerated and loose forms’. Similarly, Impressionist painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) made extensive study of Rubens’s works on view at the Louvre, while Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) found in Rubens a kindred spirit who relished the depiction of corpulent, often unnaturalistic, female forms.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Rubens’s influence has become a truly global phenomenon, with Western artists like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Jenny Saville (b. 1970) and Asian artists like Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) alike finding distinctive sources of inspiration in his work. Picasso’s large-scale anti-war masterpiece, Guernica of 1937 (Madrid, Museo Reina Sofia), for example, is modelled on Rubens’s Consequences of War of circa 1638-9 (Florence, Palazzo Pitti). For her part, Saville has professed ‘Whether you think you like Rubens or not, his influence runs through the pathways of paintings’. Her engagement with the artist can be seen not only in her large, fleshy nudes redolent of Rubens’s approach to the female figure but equally through her curation of the final gallery in the seminal exhibition Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne held at the Royal Academy in London in 2015.
Ai Weiwei’s appreciation for the ‘prince of painters’ is a particularly personal one. The artist’s The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in Untitled (After Rubens), a Lego copy of Rubens’s painting of circa 1618 (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), for example, came about through his father’s love of Rubens’s ‘strong physical muscles and the nudities of those…beautiful compositions’. This ongoing dialogue between Rubens and those who follow in his footsteps is proof that great works of art resonate as strongly today as they did when they were created some 400 years ago.