Pictures of the Month | August 2009
Picture of the Month
August 2009
Landscape in Flanders [c.1636]
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
This picture provides us with a panoramic, bird’s-eye view over a flat landscape after a rain shower — and may seem a rather familiar scene considering our own British summer! The sun is breaking through the windswept clouds, and the fields and trees appear to glisten in the sunlight.
Painting for pleasure following his retirement, Rubens shows us a view of his estate near Malines in Flanders, and his love of this particular area is evident in his thorough, honest and almost affectionate depiction of the scene. Rubens’s close study of the topography of the region and of nature is readily apparent, and his fluent, expressive handling gives a sense of exuberant life and movement to a scene unusually devoid of human presence. Only the single figure of the shepherd in a raspberry coat drives his flock into the scene on the extreme right of the picture.
Light and shadow are interwoven and contrasted to produce an effect of vivid life and movement, and each individual form — tree, hillock or cloud — is given an inner life and sense of organic growth and motion, which is one of the miracles of Rubens’s art. Rubens, considered by many to be the most versatile and influential Baroque artist of northern Europe, was not only a painter and draughtsman, but also a diplomat, employed by the rulers of the southern Netherlands as their ambassador. Through this position he became a painter to the courts of Europe, producing magnificent cycles of allegorical paintings that glorified his princely patrons.
Rubens was a major influence over later landscape painters, who admired his ability to show the subtlety and vitality of nature even at its most apparently mundane. In the opposite bay of the Red Gallery may be found JMW Turner’s The Sun Rising Through Vapour, where we can see traces of Rubens’s influence in the windswept sky.
Laura Pitcher, Barber Intern
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