Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens ran the largest painting workshop in Europe and worked as a diplomat between the courts he painted for. Born in Siegen in Westphalia in 1577, where his father was in exile after an affair with the Prince of Orange's wife, he returned to Antwerp as a boy, served as a page, and trained under three local masters. He spent eight years in Italy from 1600, in the service of the Duke of Mantua, copying Titian, Tintoretto and Michelangelo and absorbing Caravaggio's lighting. He returned to Antwerp in 1608 and became court painter to the Habsburg regents. His workshop, organised on almost industrial lines with pupils including Anthony van Dyck, produced some 1,400 works; he would make an oil sketch, assistants would enlarge it, and he would finish the passages that mattered. Prices varied by how much was his own hand. His manner is muscular, high-coloured and in constant motion — diagonal compositions, twisting bodies, flesh painted with a warmth that named a type. The Descent from the Cross, the Marie de' Medici cycle of twenty-four enormous canvases, and the hunts and mythologies are the range. He was fluent in six languages and used as an envoy by the Spanish Netherlands, negotiating between London and Madrid; he was knighted by both Charles I and Philip IV, and painted the Banqueting House ceiling in Whitehall. His first wife Isabella died in 1626; he married the sixteen-year-old Hélène Fourment in 1630, and she is in much of the late work. He died at Antwerp in 1640 of gout.

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