Peter
Paul RUBENS (1577-1640) Peter
Paul Rubens is considered one of the most important Flemish painters of
the17th century. His style became an international definition of the animated,
exuberantly sensuous aspects of baroque painting. Combining the bold brushwork,
luminous color, and shimmering light of the Venetian school with the fervent
vigor of Michelangelo's art and the formal dynamism of Hellenistic sculpture,
Rubens created a vibrant art, its pulsating energies emanating from tensions
between the intellectual and emotional, the classical and the romantic.
For 200 years the vitality and eloquence of his work influenced such artists
as Antoine Watteau, in the early 18th century, and Eugène Delacroix
and Pierre Auguste Renoir, in the 19th century.Rubens's father, Jan Rubens,
was a prominent lawyer and Antwerp alderman. Having converted from Catholicism
to Calvinism, Jan Rubens in 1568 fled Flanders with his family because
of persecutions against Protestants. In 1577 Peter Paul was born in exile
at Siegen, Westphalia (now in Germany), also the birthplace of his brother
Philip and his sister Baldina. There, their father had become the adviser
and lover of Princess Anna of Saxony, wife of Prince William I of Orange
(William the Silent). On the death of Jan Rubens in 1587, his widow returned
the family to Antwerp, where they again became Catholics. After studying
the classics in a Latin school and serving as a court page, Peter Paul
decided to become a painter. He apprenticed in turn with Tobias Verhaecht,
Adam van Noort, and Otto van Veen, called Vaenius, three minor Flemish
painters influenced by 16th-century Mannerist artists of the Florentine-Roman
school. The young Rubens was as precocious a painter as he had earlier
been a scholar of modern European languages and of classical antiquity.
In 1598, at the age of 21, he was accorded the rank of master painter of
the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. Following the example of many northern
European artists of the period, Rubens felt drawn by necessity to travel
to Italy, the center of European art for the previous two centuries. In
1600 he arrived in Venice, where he was particularly inspired by the paintings
of Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto. Later, while resident in Rome,
he was influenced by the works of Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as
by ancient Greco-Roman sculpture. Vincenzo Gonzaga (reigned 1587-1612),
the duke of Mantua, employed Rubens for about nine years. Besides executing
original works, Rubens copied Renaissance paintings for the ducal collection,
and in 1605 he served as the duke's emissary to King Philip III of Spain.
During his years in Italy, Rubens saw the early baroque works of the contemporary
Italian painters Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio, and he associated with
some of the leading humanist intellectuals of the day. When Rubens left
Italy, he was no longer a bourgeois but a gentleman, and he was not a local
artist but one of international style and reputation. His mother's death
in 1608 brought Rubens back to Antwerp, where he married Isabella Brant
in 1609. Having formulated one of the first innovative expressions of the
baroque style while in Italy, Rubens on his return was recognized as the
foremost painter of Flanders and, therefore, was immediately employed
by the burgomaster of Antwerp. His success was further confirmed in 1609,
when he was engaged as court painter to the Austrian archduke Albert and
his wife, the Spanish infanta Isabella, who together ruled the Low
Countries as viceroys for the king of Spain. The number of pictures requested
from Rubens was so large that he established an enormous workshop in which
the master did the initial sketch and final touches, while his apprentices
completed all the intermediary steps. Besides court commissions from Brussels
and abroad, the highly devout Rubens was much in demand by the militant
Counter Reformation church of Flanders, which regarded his dramatic, emotionally
charged interpretations of religious events—such as the Triptych of the
Raising of the Cross (1610-11, Antwerp Cathedral)—as images for spiritual
recruitment and renewal. Prosperity allowed Rubens to build an Italianate
residence in Antwerp, where he housed his extensive collection of art and
antiquities. Between 1622 and 1630 Rubens's value as a diplomat was equal
to his importance as a painter. In 1622 he visited Paris, where the French
queen Marie de Médicis commissioned him, for the Luxembourg Palace,
to depict her life in a series of allegorical paintings (completed 1625).
Despite the keen loss Rubens felt after the death of his wife in 1626,
he continued to be highly productive. In 1628 he was sent by the Flemish
viceroys to Spain. While in Madrid he received several commissions from
King Philip IV of Spain, who made him secretary of his Privy Council.
Rubens also served as a mentor to the young Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.
After a delicate diplomatic mission to London in 1629, he was knighted
by a grateful King Charles I of England, for whom he executed several paintings.
For Charles, Rubens also made the preliminary sketches (finished in Antwerp,
1636) for the ceiling mural in the Whitehall Palace Banqueting Hall. From
1630, when he married Hélène Fourment, until his death on
May 30, 1640, Rubens remained in Antwerp, living primarily at Castle Steen,
his country residence. During this final decade he continued executing
commissions for the Habsburg monarchs of Austria and Spain. More and more,
he also painted pictures of personal interest, especially of his wife and
child and of the Flemish countryside. The concerns of Rubens's late style,
and indeed of his whole career, are summarized in The Judgment of Paris
(circa 1635-37, National Gallery, London). In this painting voluptuous
goddesses are posed against a verdant landscape, goddesses and landscape
both symbolizing the richness of creation. Color is luxuriant, light and
shade glow, and the brushwork is sensuous. All these elements further the
meaning of the narrative, which is Paris's selection of what is most beautiful—the
lifelong concern of Rubens in his art.
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Fernando
BOTERO (1932----) Born - Medillin, Colombia Born in Medellin, Colombia in 1932,
Fernando Botero moved in 1951 to Bogota, where he had his first individual
exhibition at the Leo Matiz Gallery. He studied in Madrid at the
San Fernando Academy and in Florence, where he learned the fresco
techniques of the Italian masters. In 1956 he taught at the School of Fine
Arts of the University of Bogota and traveled to Mexico City to study the
work of Rivera and Orozco. In 1957 he exhibited at the Pan American Union
in Washington. During the sixties in New York Botero developed a
form of figurative painting integrating Renaissance and Baroque painting
with the colonial tradition of Latin America. In 1969 the Inflated Images
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York established him as
a major painter. Since 1972 he has had individual exhibitions at
the Marlborough Gallery in New York, Buchholz Gallery in Munich,
and Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris. In 1993 Fernando Botero was
honored with an exhibition of his sculpture along the Champs Elysees, the
first non-French artist to exhibit at this venue. Botero has also been
honored with an individual exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Fernando
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Pierre-Auguste
Renoir (1841-1919) Pierre Auguste Renoir was a French
impressionist painter noted for his radiant, intimate paintings, particularly
of the female nude. Recognized by critics as one of the greatestand most
independent painters of his period, Renoir is noted for the harmony of
his lines, the brilliance of his color, and the intimate charm of his wide
variety of subjects. Unlike other impressionists he was as much interested
in painting the single human figure or family group portraits as he was
in landscapes; unlike them, too, he did not subordinate composition and
plasticity of form to attempts at rendering the effect of light. Renoir
was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. As a child he worked in a porcelain
factory in Paris, painting designs on china; at 17 he copied paintings
on fans, lamp shades, and blinds. He studied painting formally in 1862-63
at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir's
early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment
of light and the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in his treatment
of color. Renoir first exhibited his paintings in Paris in
1864, but he did not gain recognition until 1874, at the first exhibition
of painters of the new impressionist school. One of the most famous of
all impressionist works is Renoir's Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876,
Musée du Louvre, Paris), an open-air scene of a café, in
which his mastery in figure painting and in representing light is
evident. Outstanding examples of his talents as a portraitist are Madame
Charpentier and Her Children (1878, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City) and Jeanne Samary. Renoir fully established his reputation with
a solo exhibition held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1883. In
1887 he completed a series of studies of a group of nude female figures
known as The Bathers (Philadelphia Museum of Art). These reveal his extraordinary
ability to depict the lustrous, pearly color and texture of skin
and to impart lyrical feeling and plasticity to a subject; they are unsurpassed
in the history of modern painting in their representation of feminine grace.
Many of his later paintings also treat the same theme in an increasingly
bold rhythmic style. During the last 20 years of his life Renoir was crippled
by arthritis; unable to move his hands freely, he continued to paint, however,
by using a brush strapped to his arm. Renoir died at Cagnes, a village
in the south of France, on December 3, 1919. Other notable paintings by
Renoir include La Loge (1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London); Woman
with Fan (1875) and The Swing (1875), both in the Louvre, Paris; The Luncheon
of the Boating Party (1881, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.); and
Vase of
Chrysanthemums (1895, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Rouen)—one of the many
still lifes of flowersand fruit he painted throughout his life.
Pierre-Auguste
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Peter
Paul RUBENS 
Pierre-Auguste
Renoir 
