Portrait of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 11 oktober 2006
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 7 september 2007

Provenance

…; sale, Warnar Wreesman Borghartzoon (c. 1748-1814, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 11 April 1816, no. 54 (‘Het Pourtret van de grooten P.P. Rubbens, halverlijf. Meesterlijk en van de beste van deze Meester, op. P. h.10, br. 7.1/2 duimen [26.5 x 19.6 cm] door A. van Dyk’), with SK-A-2319 (no. 55), fl. 275, to the dealer Jeronimo de Vries for Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785-1845), Amsterdam;¹R. Priem, ‘The ‘Most Excellent Collection’ of Lucretia Johanna van Winter: The Years 1809-22, with a Catalogue of the Works Purchased’, Simiolus 25 (1997) pp. 103-235, esp. pp. 174-75 and note 208, and p. 199, no. 5; De Vries was bidding against Apostool on behalf of the Rijksmuseum. her husband Jonkheer Hendrik Six van Hillegom (1790-1847), Amsterdam; their sons Jonkheer Jan Pieter Six van Hillegom (1824-99) and Jonkheer Pieter Hendrik Six van Vromade (1827-1905); from the latter’s heirs, with 37 other pictures, fl. 751,000, with a contribution from the Rembrandt Society of fl. 200,000, to the Dutch Government, 1907; presented to the museum, with SK-A-2319, 1908; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1999-2011

ObjectNumber: SK-A-2318

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Biography

Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - London 1641)

Anthony van Dyck was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Antwerp, on 22 March 1599, the seventh child of a prosperous haberdasher. He died on 9 December 1641 in Blackfriars, London, and was buried two days later in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. By then he was internationally famous, and had to his credit an oeuvre of well over seven hundred paintings, consisting mostly in portraits, but also some highly esteemed sacred and profane figure subjects. He had outlived Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had greatly influenced him in his youth, by only some eighteen months, but he was to prove the more widely influential.

Enrolled as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen (1574/1575-1632) in 1609, he became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke nine years later before he was eighteen and a week before he received his majority – an event perhaps connected with this father’s financial difficulties which had begun in 1615 and ended with the sale of the family house in 1620, having caused strife in the family. In the meantime, Van Dyck had earlier entered Rubens’s studio, and had perhaps already operated unofficially as an artist working from a house in Antwerp called Den Dom van Ceulen. He was the only one of Rubens’s assistants to be named in the contract for the paintings for the Antwerp Jesuit Church signed on 22 March 1620.

There is no contemporary archival evidence for the existence of a studio functioning for Van Dyck before he left Antwerp for London and Rome. However, statements given in a lawsuit in Antwerp in 1660/1661 and the number of contemporary versions of some of Van Dyck’s works of that time would indicate at the least that there was a group of artists working in Van Dyck’s milieu, however informally.²See S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 15-16; for a recent review of the evidence concerning Van Dyck’s practice in these years, see F. Lammertse and A. Vergara, ‘A Portrait of Van Dyck as a Young Artist’, in F. Lammertse and A. Vergara (eds.), The Young Van Dyck, exh. cat. Madrid (Museo Nacional del Prado) 2012, pp. 23-74, esp. pp. 28-29 and nos. 34-48.

Van Dyck left Antwerp for London in October 1620; the purpose of his short visit – he was granted permission to leave at the end of the following February – is not known, but he received a payment from King James I (1566-1625) and was expected to return in eight months. He was recorded soon afterwards as living in Rome in the same house as George Gage (c. 1582-1632), an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ employed by the British crown to advance negotiations for the prince of Wales’s ‘Spanish match’ at the papal court.³See F. Rangoni, ‘Anthony van Dyck and George Gage in Rome’, The Burlington Magazine 160 (2018), pp. 4-9.

In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.⁴For his time in Palermo, see X. Salomon, Van Dyck in Sicily 1624-25: Painting and the Plague, exh. cat. London (Dulwich Picture Gallery) 2012. He re-established himself in 1627 in Antwerp, and was appointed court painter to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduchess Isabella (1566-1633); his practice extended to The Hague whence he was summoned on two occasions.

By the summer of 1632, Van Dyck had settled in London; he was knighted by King Charles I (1600-1649) and then granted an annual pension as a retainer. But in the spring of 1634, he was in Antwerp and by the end of the year he was living in Brussels. By March 1635 he had returned to London and was established in a studio, specially converted by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), on the Thames at Blackfriars. In great demand, not only by the king as a portrait painter, Van Dyck mixed with members of the court and married in 1640 Mary Ruthven, who was of a Scots noble family. In the autumn of 1640 he was in Antwerp, and early in 1641 briefly in Paris whence he returned hoping to gain the patronage of King Louis XIII (1601-1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642). There in November, he wrote that he was very unwell; back in London with his wife for her lying-in, he died shortly after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana.

References
S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 1-12

Entry

This portrait of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640; for a biography of whom see e.g. SK-A-346) was acquired with a portrait of the jurist and historian Jan Caspar Gevaerts (1593-1666; SK-A-2319) for the prestigious Van Winter collection as the work of Anthony van Dyck. Later both were sold as such to the Dutch government in 1907, and catalogued by the museum as autograph until 1926, and in the case of SK-A-2319 until 1934, when the present painting was omitted from the catalogue. Evers in 1944 attributed the present work to Van Dyck,⁵H.G. Evers, Rubens und sein Werk neue Forschungen, Brussels 1944, p. 332 and fig. 361. but Burchard rejected the attribution nine years later,⁶Burchard’s letter of 25 February 1949, copy RMA. and recently Vey has followed other authorities by describing it as a copy.⁷Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, under no. III.161.

The work is to be associated with the grisaille oil sketches executed by Van Dyck in preparation for his Iconography, a series of etched and engraved portraits of famous personages, mostly contemporary. The earliest reference to such a set of prints occurs in March 1632.⁸Luijten in C. de Pauw and G. Luijten, Anthony van Dyck as a Printmaker, exh. cat. Antwerp (Museum Plantin Moretus/Stedelijk Prentenkabinet)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1999-2000, pp. 73-74. The prints were preceded by, at the least, ad vivum drawings (or drawn copies of likenesses) and oil-sketches in grisaille, the latter on a scale similar to the eventual print. The purpose of the oil sketches in the process is not certain – on the rare occasion when Van Dyck etched a portrait himself none seems to have been executed – but they must have been intended to act as a guide for the engraver.

The great majority of the extant grisailles – most of which are thought to be autograph – is in the collection of the duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry at Boughton House, Northamptonshire. This group has a provenance that goes back to the artist Sir Peter Lely (1618-1680), but contains some replicas, or near replicas, and is uneven in quality.⁹Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, p. 365. The museum picture closely connects with (but is larger than) the design for the portrait of Rubens at Boughton, which has been claimed to be the working grisaille¹⁰Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, no. III.161. executed in the process of creating the print.¹¹S. Turner and C. Depauw, The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Anthony van Dyck, 8 vols., Rotterdam 2002, II, no. 85. But differences between these two and some clumsy passages – especially in the ruff – suggest that the Buccleuch sketch may itself be a copy and not a prototype from which the print was made.

It is generally agreed that the museum picture is a copy of the Buccleuch sketch; the 1976 museum catalogue suggested it was made in Van Dyck’s studio, and Luijten has more recently claimed that the original grisailles were kept by Van Dyck and that he ‘had his pupils copy them’.¹²Luijten in C. de Pauw and G. Luijten, Anthony van Dyck as a Printmaker, exh. cat. Antwerp (Museum Plantin Moretus/Stedelijk Prentenkabinet)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1999-2000, pp. 81-82. Such a circumstance would be a repetition of what was recollected as having happened with the Apostle series¹³De Poorter in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, p. 67. during Van Dyck’s first Antwerp period (c. 1613-1620) and would explain the large number of extant copies of the grisaille sketches. Vey has implicitly rejected this theory by referring to ‘a number of able painters [in Antwerp and Brussels] who could translate a Van Dyck drawing or painting into a grisaille … It goes pretty much without saying that their grisailles would have subsequently found their way into Van Dyck’s workshop stock.’¹⁴Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, p. 365.

The museum picture is not a grisaille, but rather is executed in shades of brown, and although Vey has described all the Boughton sketches as grisailles, Luijten has stated that some sketches – perhaps not those that were connected with the process of making the prints – were ‘composed in brown or greenish hues’.¹⁵Luijten in C. de Pauw and G. Luijten, Anthony van Dyck as a Printmaker, exh. cat. Antwerp (Museum Plantin Moretus/Stedelijk Prentenkabinet)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1999-2000, p. 81. This work was executed with no underdrawing in brunaille. The weak handling of the Rijksmuseum painting suggests quite a distance from Van Dyck or his studio, if the latter did indeed make such copies. It is quite possible that this brunaille was painted after, but not long after, Van Dyck’s death, but precisely when is impossible to estimate. The hand seems not the same as that which executed the Gevaerts portrait (SK-A-2319). Klein has estimated that the oak support (from the German/Netherlandish region) would have been ready for use ‘possibly from 1630’, while ‘more plausible’ would be a date from 1640.¹⁶In a report dated 20 December 2020, kindly made available by Michael Ripps, Klein stated that wood from the same tree was used as the support for a ‘Portrait of a Man’; this was a portrait of Adam de Coster, also deriving from Van Dyck’s prototype at Boughton, which was offered for sale at Sotheby’s London, 23 September 2020, no. 79.

The prototype from which Paul Pontius (1603-1658) made his engraving for the Iconography would have been executed during Van Dyck’s ‘second’ Antwerp period (c. 1627-1632/1634), around 1630. Van Dyck must have known Rubens’s appearance well from early in his career and we know that they had encountered one another¹⁷Original Unpublished Papers Illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens etc., collected and ed. by W. Noël Sainsbury, London 1859, p. 119, for Lord Carlisle’s chance meeting in Antwerp with Rubens ‘at Mons Van-digs (Van Dyck)’ on 27 May 1628. in the early summer of 1628, so it is curious that (as has been remarked) Van Dyck endowed his sitter with a thinning head of hair, for Rubens was already bald by the middle of the second decade.¹⁸As he portrayed himself in The Four Philosophers, Palazzo Pitti (H. Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (2): Portraits of Identified Sitters Painted in Antwerp, London 1987, no. 117). Is it possible that Van Dyck was unaware of this, because Rubens may have remained covered (i.e. did not remove his hat) when they met?

Vey elaborated Liedtke’s¹⁹W.A. Liedtke, Flemish Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 vols., coll. cat. New York 1984, p. 91. proposal by suggesting that the sitter’s ‘forward leaning pose’ was inspired by Rubens’s own Self-Portrait in the Rubenshuis.²⁰H. Vlieghe, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (2): Portraits of Identified Sitters Painted in Antwerp, London 1987, no. 136.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, under no. III.161

Collection catalogues

1908, p. 417, no. 857a (as by Van Dyck); 1976, p. 209, no. A 2318 (as Studio of Van Dyck).

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'after Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), c. 1630 - c. 1650', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8290

(accessed 10 May 2025 13:01:09).