Church Times - Adam and Eve and, of course, the horse

Adam and Eve and, of course, the horse

Nicholas Cranfield enjoys the chance to explore Flemish double acts in the painter’s studio
The Vision of Saint Hubert
No ordinary stag: The Vision of Saint Hubert, c.1617-20, by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens MUSEO DEL PRADO, MADRID

IT MAY be a measure of cultural hegemony that an exhibition dedicated to the leading Flemish artists of their day from Antwerp should be staged first in Los Angeles and now in the more intimate surroundings of The Hague; but, until 1838 and the creation of Belgium, the Low Countries were not divided on the political lines of today. Both the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Mauritshuis hold significant works by this collaborative team. Furthermore, the Mauritshuis most recently added to its holdings of Rubens with the purchase of portraits of his sister-in-law and her husband.

When the Getty Museum showed this small exhibition of just 27 works last year, they were displayed in a modern lit gallery. By way of stark contrast, the Mauritshuis is able to do more justice to the sort of darker, heavy wood interiors of the 17th century which both artists would readily recognise.

The paintings on show mark the close association of Jan (“Velvet”) Brueghel (1568-1625) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), both of whom were already well-established in their own right — not that working together was that unusual in the period. In part, it was a development of a 15th-century workshop practice across Flanders.

Rubens also worked with Frans Snyders (1579-1657), among others, and, aged 20, in the 1590s, Brueghel had co-operated with the painter Hans Rottenhammer (1564-1625) when he lived in Rome; two of their copperplate paintings, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt and The Descent into Limbo, are the earliest works in this show, and evidence Brueghel’s aptitude for working with a fellow artist.

But, of course, there was often more to celebrate than a convenient studio practice: Hendrick van Balen, for instance, lived a few doors down the same Antwerp street as Brueghel when, in 1608/09, they painted The Prophecy of Isaiah (Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Rubens, ever the internationalist, acted as Italian secretary and amanuensis to Jan Brueghel to keep in contact with his Milanese patron, Cardinal Federico Borromeo. He was also godfather to Brueghel’s two eldest children, and became guardian for those who survived the cholera epidemic that killed their father in January 1625.

The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man
Another collaborator: The Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man, c.1610-12, by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick de Clerck STAATSGALERIE NEUBURG AN DER DONAU, BAYERISCHE STAATSGEMALDESAMMLUNGEN

Some two dozen joint paintings have survived, and half of their shared oeuvre forms the core of this extraordinarily deep exploration of the working methods of artists in the Early Modern period.

Their first surviving work was The Battle of the Amazons (Potsdam), most recently seen in the London exhibition of early Rubens. It was painted after Brueghel had returned from his seven-year sojourn in Italy, in 1596, four years before Rubens set off for the court of Mantua. The division of labour played to the strength of each. Rubens was a figurative artist, and Brueghel was a landscape and “outdoor” painter (although we should remember that all these paintings were painted indoors in studio conditions).

In 1608, Rubens returned to his homeland at hearing the news of his mother’s final illness. In fact, she had died before he reached Antwerp. He resumed his joint partnership with Brueghel, painting The Return from War — Mars disarmed by Venus (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) as a way of marking the 1609 signing of The Twelve Years Truce in their homeland. Its composition is set in a cavernous underworld, familiar from other works of Brueghel’s, such as the Allegory of Fire that he painted with van Balen (Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome), based on the Roman baths of Diocletian which we know he had sketched in 1594.

In this painting, Rubens made dramatic revisions to Brueghel’s original work, adding no less than five cubic metres to the panel, overpainting many details, and altering the composition. Their amity survived this onslaught for future work in which, usually, Rubens was the painter of figures (often derived from the classical and Renaissance figures that he had studied in Italy) and Brueghel supplied the background and the birds and beasts.

Not that this division of labour stopped Rubens painting in an outrageously uncalled-for horse behind Adam and Eve in the jointly signed panel painting in the Mauritshuis collection since 1822. Nor, in The Vision of Saint Hubert (The Prado, Madrid), did it prevent Brueghel’s perfectly imitating his younger friend’s artistry in the stallion from which St Hubert has just dismounted.

The relationship between Rubens and Snyders was of a different order, since Rubens paid for the compositions that his friend added. Between them, they produced some of the most haunting and distressing images in this show. From Philadelphia, the Prometheus Unbound (1611-12) is nothing if not dramatic as a celebration of hubris. The portrayal of torment seems to be a commentary on the contemporary world in which it was painted.

In April 1618, Rubens swapped this and another 11 works of his own with Sir Dudley Carleton (the English Ambassador in the Low Countries) for Carleton’s collection of antique sculpture. Carleton, no doubt aware of the potential market for masterpieces by Rubens, attempted to sell it on to the King of Denmark later that year, but without success, and it came into the royal collection in London only to be lost in the Commonwealth.

Yet more gruesome is The Head of Medusa, now in Vienna, but once owned by Charles I’s favourite, the 1st Duke of Buckingham. This was painted (c.1617-18) for an unknown patron who may have enjoyed the terribilità of this atropaic image. Snakes disgorge from the severed neck of the monstrous gorgon slain by Perseus. The force of the image lies in the way in which Rubens has painted the head as if it is hewn from cold marble. Only the frozen, bulging eyes and the seeping blood suggest that mortal life had once kindled the most beautiful daughter of the sea gods. Raped in a temple dedicated to Minerva by Neptune, it had been Minerva who had transformed her hair into a knot of horrid snakes.

“The sugar palace”, as the Mauritshuis is sometimes nicknamed, revealing the origins of the trade that led to the wealth it represents, has a permanent collection of an international standard. This makes it enjoyable to study the world in which both Rubens and Brueghel grew up, and to see their contribution to Western European art.

“Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship” is in the Mauritshuis, Korte Vijverberg 8, The Hague, The Netherlands, until 28 January. Phone 00 31 70 302 3456.