Flemish painter. Creator of the school of Antwerp and the Flemish baroque, the Master of several generations of painters, Van Dyck with Renoir, carried out a double career of diplomat and artist. The life and the work of this heir to the humanistic culture, “Homère of painting”, as will call it Delacroix, are an anthem with the harmony of the man and nature.

The political disturbances and monks which tear the Netherlands to the XVI ^E century lead Jan Rubens, lawyer from Antwerp convert with the Calvinism, to take refuge with its family in Cologne. There, following an intrigue in love with the wife with Guillaume the Silent one, it will be condemned to death, then pardoned and will be assigned with residence in the small town of Siegen, where will be born Philip then, in 1577, Pierre Paul.

To the death of Jan Rubens, his widow goes back to Antwerp with her children, to which it gave a catholic education. At eleven years, Pierre Paul enters to the college of Rombaut Verdonck, where he studies the literatures Greek and Latin, and meets that which will be his faithful friend, B. Moretus, printer working in the old workshop of famous Plantin and for which Rubens will illustrate a missal (1613) and a Roman breviary (1614).

In 1590, it is placed like page at Marguerite de Ligne Arenberg. The trouble reigns on this court of province, and, if he learns the rudiments from the label and the diplomacy, the teenager especially occupies himself to draw and copy engravings To last and of Holbein. The following year, it enters in training in Tobias Verhaecht, painter landscape designer, then in Adam Van Noort (the Master of Jordaens), in whom it will remain four years before joining the workshop of Otto van Veen. This one, senior of the guild of Saint-Luc, is a cultivated man, whose humanistic ideal is anchored at Michel-Angel, Raphaël and Barocci.

The first works of Rubens whom one knows are a Portrait of young man (1597) and Adam and Eve with the paradise, inspired by an engraving of Raimondi and carried out the following year, during which the painter is allowed at the guild of Saint-Luc.

In May 1600, Rubens leaves for Italy with its first pupil, Deodat Van der Mont, and arrives at Venice at July. Presented to Vincent Gonzague I, it joined the court of Mantoue, where it is primarily seen entrusting copies of tables, works hard of which it escapes by the study, in the gallery of the duke, works of Titien, Andrea Mantegna, Corrège and Raphaël.

At the end of the year, it accompanies Gonzague with Florence to attend the marriage by procuration of Marie de Médicis, scene which it will recreate twenty years later. It probably makes profitable this stay to study the Battle of Anghiari de Vinci and the tomb of Médicis of Michel-Angel, which it will take as a starting point for its Samson and Dalila, of 1609.

In 1601, Rubens is in Rome, where the ideal naturalist of Carrache and theobscure dramatic one of Caravage reign then. He feels at ease in the atmosphere of spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, and, if he continues the study of the Masters assiduously - Michel-Angel, Raphaël -, he also answers his first order, three tables for the Sainte-Hélène vault of the church Santa Croce in Gerusalemme: the Christ crowned of spines, Crucifixion and Holy Helene with the true cross.

The following year, having regained Mantoue, it receives from the duke his first diplomatic mission: it leaves to give to Philippe III of Spain a considerable whole of present, among which one fits with body, six horses and sixteen copies of works of Raphaël and Titien. This first mission is a bitter experiment but also the occasion to carry out an equestrian portrait of the duke of Lerma, which inaugurates the topic of the equestrian portrait baroque, taken again by Van Dyck and Vélasquez.

Rubens returns in Mantoue, but, tired to use its talent with copies, he requests the duke “to employ it on the spot or abroad with the work more adapted to his talent”. It is charged to carry out three tables for the church of the Jesuits, the Baptism, the Transfiguration and the Family of Gonzague adoring the Holy Trinity. Of return to Rome in 1605, it finds his Philip brother, with whom it looks further into his knowledge of art and philosophy antiques. In 1608, Philip will publish Electorum Libri II, illustrated by Pierre Paul, itself become burning collector of antiques.

Meanwhile, Rubens wrote to the duke of Mantoue his intention to remain in Rome. The duke, indeed, pays badly, and the painter has just received an order of the fathers of the Oratory. By painting the marchioness Brigida Spinola (1606), it gives to the aristocratic portrait the new guns which will be taken again by Van Dyck then, at the next century, by Reynolds and Gainsborough. The kind will reach with Helene Fourment with fits with body, around 1639, a dynamism and a sumptuousness which will carry it at the top of a tradition resulting from the Rebirth.

Admiror of Caravage - he advises with the duke of Mantoue to acquire his Death of the Virgin, refused by the Jesuits, and copies his Setting with the tomb -, Rubens dissociates himself some however by a treatment of space less stylized and a refusal of clearly-obscure with the profit of more interiorized light.

With the autumn 1608, the painter learns that his/her mother is dying, and it decides to return to Antwerp, where, the insistence and the generosity of the regents helping, it will remain. In October 1609, he marries Isabelle Brant, and paints on this occasion their double portrait under an honeysuckle (emblem of love), being held by the right hand (symbol of marital harmony). This allegory of the marriage will be a recurrent theme in its work, of the cycle of Marie de Médicis, with Jupiter and Junon, with the Garden of love and the Walk in the garden.

Of Isabelle, with whom it will live seventeen years, it will have three children. Thanks to his/her Philip brother, appointed secretary of the town of Antwerp, and with the burgomaster, Rubens obtains the many ones and important orders. Thus, after the triptych of the Erection of the Cross, it realizes in 1611, for the guild of the Arquebusiers, the retable of the Deposition, which deeply renews the iconography worked out by its predecessors Van Eyck, Memling and Van der Weyden: the two side panels are not any more one extension of the central scene but are linked by an iconographic topic, portement of Christ.

In 1610, Rubens buys a ground in the best district of Antwerp and, a few years later, there made build a vast workshop and a villa with Italian, with a garden equipped with a house and populated statues of Bacchus, Cérès and Hercules. Very many assistants animate his workshop, and he writes in 1611 to have “to push back the requests of more than one hundred pupils”. The perfect organization of this workshop and the talent of the best pupils make it possible to the Master to answer a very abundant request for retables and religious tables. He does not hesitate, where necessary, to entrust certain details of the tables to external collaborators, to the landscape designer Jan Wildens, to the animalists Paul Of Your and Frans Snyders or to the painter of flowers Jan Bruegel.

The passion of collector of Rubens is suddenly revived by an English, to sir Dudley Carleton. Eager to acquire tables by paying them in kind, this one runs up against the stubborn refusal of the painter, who ends up granting his proposal provided that Carleton yields its collection of antiques to him (which it will resell fifteen years later with the duke of Buckingham).

In spite of a heavy workload, Rubens does not give up the mythological subjects: the Removal of Ganymède, connected Prométhée, the Four Continents and Samson and Dalila testify to the interest without weakness that it carries to the traditional literature and Antiquity. Conscious of its genius, he writes in 1621 with the agent of king d' Angleterre Jacques Ier: “No company, for vast that it is in its scale and diversified in its subject, exceeded my courage.” Ten years later, it will receive the ordering of the decoration of the room of the Banquets of Whitehall.

Whereas the Netherlands fell down in political uncertainty after the death of Philippe III of Spain, Marie de Médicis calls Rubens in Paris to decorate two galleries with the palate of Luxembourg. It meets Peiresc then - a large collector of antiques with which it will maintain a correspondence friendly and regular - and the duke of Buckingham, of which it brushes a superb equestrian portrait. It is in Antwerp, in its workshop, that it carries out the panels ordered by Marie de Médicis, that it returns to install in 1625, whereas Antwerp is devastated by the plague. The following year, Isabelle dies: “I think, written Rubens, that a voyage would be advised to move away me a time from the many objects which renew necessarily my sorrow.”

Rubens accepts new diplomatic missions, and, become to advise Isabelle infante, of which it made the portrait in 1625, it leaves in 1628 for Madrid. To escape the risks from the negotiations which trail in length, Rubens does not cease painting, and copies in the royal collections of works of Titien: Venus and Adonis, the Removal of Europe, Adam and Eve. It meets and appreciates the Vélasquez young person, with whom it advises the voyage from Italy.

In 1629, Philippe IV appoints Rubens “secretary of the private Council of the king for the Business of the Netherlands”. In England, the negotiations appear thorny: “They change opinion of hour into hour and always of evil into worse.” The court appears venal to him, the king without power. It ends however up carrying it; responsible for honors and orders, Rubens is impatient to return to Antwerp.

At the end of the year 1630, the painter marries Helene Fourment, a sixteen year old young girl, whereas it has some fifty-three. “I decided to remarry me, he with his friend Peiresc writes, because I was never carried to the abstemious life of the celibacy. I chose an young girl of honest but middle-class family although everyone wanted to persuade to me to make a marriage of court. I chose somebody who would not redden to see the brushes with the hand.” The couple will have five children. Though disgusted diplomacy, by honesty with respect to Marie de Médicis the painter still agrees to intervene with the infante, but begs shortly after that it is exempted new missions. That is granted to him, with new honors: Philippe IV the fact knight.

With the death of the Isabelle infante, in 1633, the new governor, Ferdinand, announces his arrival in Antwerp for 1635. Rubens is charged to design triumphal arches for the celebration of this event. As of this time, he suffers from violent crises of drop. He acquires in the countryside a sumptuous residence, the castle of Steen, where he spends the summer months and where he paints his the more beautiful and vaster landscapes: Landscape with the rainbow, Landscape with the castle of Steen. Orders still reach him, in particular that of the decoration of the hunting lodge of Philippe IV in Torre of Parada. The portraits of family which it carries out then mingle with harmony the guns with the aristocratic portrait with an intimacy and a spontaneousness full with life. Rubens dies on on May 30th, 1640, eight month before the birth of his last child.

The heritage of Rubens, it is not only one new iconography, a luminous chromatism, a daring technique, it is also a global design of art: for him, painting, sculpture, architecture must be combined in a total unit of expression. He triumphs finally fully at the end of the “quarrel of the color”, during which its treaty on the sculpture is published by Roger de Piles.