The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (418 page)

 
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Royal College of Art
, London.

Postgraduate university institution, now Britain's pre-eminent training school for artists and designers. It was founded in 1837 as the School of Design and was originally a school of industrial design, the fine arts being the province of the
Royal Academy
. In 1852 it moved from its original home in Somerset House to Marlborough House and was renamed the Central School of Practical Art. It became part of the Government Department of Science and Art in 1853 and in 1857 it moved to join the Museum of Ornamental Art (later the
Victoria and Albert Museum
) in South Kensington. In 1863 it moved to new buildings in Exhibition Road, and in 1896 it was renamed the Royal College of Art by Queen Victoria and allowed to grant diplomas. The College moved again to new buildings in Kensington Gore in 1961 and in 1967 was given a Royal Charter and empowered to award degrees. Some of the most illustrious British artists of the 20th cent. have been students at the Royal College of Art, among them Barbara
Hepworth
, David
Hockney
, and Henry
Moore
.

 
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(1577–1640).
Flemish painter, designer, and diplomat, the greatest and most influential figure in
Baroque
art in northern Europe. He was born at Siegen in Westphalia, the son of a Protestant lawyer from Antwerp who moved to Germany to escape religious persecution, and he returned to Antwerp in 1587 with his mother soon after his father's death. He had been baptized a Calvinist in Germany, but he became a devout Catholic. His fairly undistinguished masters were three painters of Antwerp, Tobias
Verhaecht
, Adam van
Noort
, and Otto van
Veen
. The first two could teach him no more than the local tradition, but van Veen was a man of some culture, who had spent about five years in Rome, and he no doubt inspired his pupil with a desire to visit Italy. Rubens became a master in the Antwerp painters' guild in 1598, and after working with van Veen for two more years he set out for Italy in 1600. Very little of Rubens's early work survives, and his style was largely formed in Italy, where he was based until 1608. He worked for Vincenzo
Gonzaga
, Duke of Mantua, visiting most of the principal art centres of Italy to make copies for the ducal collection and also in 1603–4 travelling to Spain when he accompanied gifts from Vincenzo to Philip III. The most important centres of Rubens's activity in Italy, however, were Genoa and Rome. In Genoa he painted some stately aristocratic portraits (
Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria
, NG, Washington, 1606) that inspired van
Dyck
when he worked in the city, and in Rome he found the basis of his own grandiose style in the
antique, the
great masters of the
Renaissance
, and Annibale
Carracci
.
On learning that his mother was seriously ill, Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608, but she died before he arrived. Italy had become Rubens's spiritual home (he usually signed himself ‘Pietro Pauolo’) and he considered returning for good, but his success in Antwerp was so immediate and great that he remained there, and in spite of his extensive travels later in his career he never saw Italy again. In 1609 Rubens was appointed court painter to the Archduke Albert and his wife the Infanta Isabella , the Spanish Viceroys in the Netherlands, and in the same year he married the 17-year-old Isabella Brant, the daughter of an eminent Antwerp lawyer. The portrait of himself and his wife (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) that he painted presumably to mark the occasion gives a marvellous picture of Rubens on the threshold of his great career—handsome, vigorous, and dashingly self-confident. In the next few years he established his reputation as the pre-eminent painter in northern Europe, his first two resounding successes being the huge
triptychs
of the
Raising of the Cross
and the
Descent from the Cross
(Antwerp Cathedral, 1610–11 and 1611–14), which showed his mastery of history painting in the
Grand Manner
and the immense vigour of his style.
The demand for Rubens's work was extraordinary, and he was able to meet it only because he ran an extremely efficient studio. It is not known how many pupils or assistants he had because as court painter he was exempt from registering them with the guild. The idea of his running a sort of picture factory has been exaggerated, but even a man of his seemingly inexhaustible intellectual and physical stamina (he habitually rose at 4 a.m.) could not carry out all the work involved in his massive output with his own hands. Rubens both collaborated with established artists (‘Velvet’
Brueghel
, van Dyck ,
Jordaens
, Daniel
Seghers
,
Snyders
, and others) and retouched pictures by pupils, the degree of his intervention being reflected in the price. Generally his assistants did much of the work between the initial oil sketch and the master's finishing touches. Modern taste has tended to admire these sketches and his drawings (in which his personal touch is evident in every stroke of brush, chalk, or pen) more than the large-scale works, but Rubens himself would surely have found this attitude hard to comprehend, for the sheer scale and grandeur of the finished paintings gives them an extra, symphonic dimension.
Rubens not only painted virtually every type of subject, but also designed tapestries, book illustrations, and decorations of festivals, as well as giving visual directives for sculptors, metalworkers, and architects. ‘My talents are such’, he wrote in 1621, ‘that I have never lacked courage to undertake any design, however vast in size or diversified in subject.’ So huge was his output, indeed, that it is difficult to put a figure on it; the
Corpus Rubenianum
, the first attempt in the 20th cent. at a complete scholarly catalogue of his work, began publication in 1968 and is expected to fill about thirty volumes. His biggest commission in Flanders was for the decoration of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp (a building he may also have had a hand in designing), but almost all his work there was destroyed by fire in 1718. From outside Flanders, those who sought his services included the royal families of France, England, and Spain. For Marie de'
Médicis
(mother of Louis XIII of France) he did a series of twenty-five enormous paintings on her life (Louvre, Paris, 1622–5); for Charles I of England he painted a series of canvases representing the reign of his father James I (completed 1635) for the ceiling of the Banqueting House in London (the only one of his major decorative schemes still in the position for which it was painted); and for Philip IV of Spain he embarked in 1636 on a series of more than a hundred mythological pictures for his hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada (the series was incomplete when Rubens died and most of the finished paintings—executed by assistants from his
modelli
—were destroyed in 1710 when the building was sacked during the War of the Spanish Succession).
After the death of the Archduke Albert in 1621, Rubens became a trusted adviser to the Infanta Isabella, and he was employed in negotiations to try to gain peace in the Netherlands. In 1628–9 Isabella sent him on a diplomatic mission to Spain (where he met
Velázquez
) and this led to him going to England on behalf of the Spanish King, Philip IV, in 1629–30. He played an important part in the arrangement of a peace settlement between England and Spain, and Charles I knighted him. In his diplomatic role his polished manners and his prodigious linguistic skills were put to good advantage—apart from Flemish and Italian, he knew French, German, Latin, and Spanish. Rubens's wife died in 1626 and in 1630 he remarried; his bride was the 16-year-old Hélène Fourment, daughter of a rich silk merchant and the niece of his first wife. The second marriage was as happy as the first, and Rubens's love of his family shines through many of his late paintings (
Hélène Fourment with Two of her Children
, Louvre,
c.
1637). In 1635 he bought a country house, the Château de Steen, between Brussels and Malines, and in his final years he developed a new passion for painting landscapes—marvellously ripe works that led
Constable
to declare ‘In no branch of the art is Rubens greater than in landscape.’ Superb examples are in the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection, London.
Rubens's influence in 17th-cent. Flanders was overwhelming, and it was spread elsewhere in Europe by his journeys abroad and by pictures exported from his workshop, and also through the numerous engravings he commissioned of his work. In later centuries, his influence has also been immense, perhaps most noticeably in France, where
Watteau
,
Delacroix
, and
Renoir
were among his greatest admirers. Because of the unrivalled variety of his work, artists as different in temperament as these three could respond to it with equal enthusiasm.

 
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