Peter Paul Rubens [antikvár]

PETER PAUL RUBENS: 1577—1640 The name of the great seventeenth-century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens is known throughout the world. The importance of his work for the development of European culture is generally recognized. The perception of life that he revealed in his pictures is so vivid, fundamental humán values are affirmed in them with such force that we look on Rubens' paintings as a living aesthetic phenomenon of our own time as well. The museums of the Soviet Union have a superb collection of the great Flemish painter's works, These are concentrated, for the most part, in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrád which possesses one of the finest Rubens' collections in the world. Three works, previously alsó part of the Hermitage collection, now belong to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. The Bacchanalia (pls. 19-22) and The Apotheosis of the Infanta Isabella (pls. 80, 81) were bought for the Hermitage in 1779 with the Walpole collection (from Houghton Hall in England); The Last Supper (pl. 64) came to the Hermitage in 1768 from the Cobenzl collection (Brussels). These three paintings were transferred from Leningrád to Moscow in 1924 and 1930. A Rubens sketch now in the Kiev Museum of Western and Eastern Art was formerly in the Khanenko family collection, which förmed the basis of that museum. Bogdán Khanenko (1858-1917) and his wife Varvara Khanenko (née Tereshchenko, 1857-1922) built up their representative collection in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection of the Soviet museums is outstanding not just because it contains many originál works by Rubens, or that many of these are genuine masterpieces, but alsó because its rangé is so extensive: the varied aspects of the painter's activities, the different genres of artistic expression and all periods of his creative career are here represented. There are paintings on religious, mythological, allegorical and historical themes; landscapes; portraits; monumental altarpieces completed through the efforts of his whole workshop; and sketches that set down the first conceptions or the separate stages in the development of the artist's creative thoughts. There are life studies and plans for complex decorative ensembles; official court commissions and intimate portraits of close friends; the first efforts, still following in the footsteps of his predecessors, and the summations of his life work. The creative world of the great artist unfolds itself both in its achievements and its evolution. Rubens' works occupied a notable place in the renowned European collections, the purchase of which in 1764 provided the starting point for the Hermitage. Four of the paintings reproduced in the present book were obtained in 1768 as part of the Brussels collection of Count Carl de Cobenzl, the Austrian ruler of Belgium; three others came in 1769 with the collection of Count Heinrich Brühl, who was a minister of the King of Saxony in Dresden. Eight paintings förmed part of the collection of the French financier Pierre Crozat in Paris and were acquired in 1772, while a further nine works entered the Hermitage in 1779 with the collection of the former British Prime Minister Róbert Walpole. One Rubens' painting arrived with the Paris collection of le Comte de Baudouin in 1781, and another was bought in Amsterdam in 1770 at the auction of the F. I. Dufferin collection. The provenance of certain other paintings has not been precisely established but they entered the Hermitage holdings before 1783.