After
the Protestants were driven out of Antwerp, it became a Catholic
center and various orders — Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans,
Carmelites — came flocking back.
Churches swept bare by the iconoclasts cried for new adornment.
Paintings, moreover, were an indispensable tool to educate the
faithful. Painters and sculptors, good and bad, reaped rich harvest.
Rubens’s
success was instantaneous. Even though he was frequently abroad on
diplomatic espionage, his studio became the city's artistic focus. He
could not cope singlehandedly with the numerous commissions and
demands on his talent. Everybody wanted a piece of Rubens, and he had
to multiply himself.
Intellectually
Rubens could hold his own with the finest minds in Europe; creatively
he flowed as the mighty and incessant Scheldt. He knew what he
wanted, sketched rapidly, kept subordinates hopping, and used every
awake second intensively. He got up at 4:00 a.m. for mass, ate
breakfast, and went to his studio, where he stayed until 5:00 p.m.
For
25 years he illustrated books for his close friend Balthazar
Moretus, head of the finest printing house in
Flanders, Flantin-Moretus Press. Moretus would give Rubens each
assignment six months in advance, and whenever Rubens found an odd
moment wherever he was, he would sketch out his ideas. By deadline
the job was finished, no matter how caught up in other matters Rubens
had been.
But
there a limit to how much one person could sketch and paint in a day.
The Rubens studio had to become the Rubens workshop. Art historian
Edward Dillon went so far as to say (1909) that Rubens created “what
is perhaps the most extensive manufactory of pictures the world has
ever seen.”
Rubens
found, enlarged, and remodeled a great Italianate mansion south of
the Place de Meir, and there Rubens surrounded himself with a swarm
of students and assistants. His students were learners, and they had
much to learn, for merely his structural methods required several
pages of detailed instructions in the notes kept by his friend Doctor
Theodore Turquet de Mayerne.
They
helped prepare canvas, ground pigments, mixed chemicals, cleaned up
the workshop, may even have helped make frames. With
their own paintings they imitated what they saw and took instruction
when not serving the master in some way.
Within
three years of opening his studio, Rubens complained that the crush
to study under him was so great that be had already turned away more
than 100 applicants.
One
mother brought a son whom Rubens did not
want under any circumstance.
“You
won’t be wasting your time with him. On the contrary, be will
help you. He can do so many things in your place. For instance he can
paint your grounds.”
“Great
Scot, madame,” Rubens said
sarcastically. “He would render me a
real service. That's one thing I don't know how to do yet.”
There
is no way of ascertaining how many students and assistants Rubens had
at any one time. There were many. Archduchess Isabella gave Rubens an
exemption with the Guild of St. Luke.
Normally
we might expect that a painter would have to pay the Guild its
regular fees for each apprentice enlisted,
and probably he would also pay the yearly dues of masters in his
employ. By being excused from these excises
Rubens saved a great deal of money but also deprived the archives of
interesting records.
Rubens’s
assistants were young masters in the Guild who wanted the experience
of working with him. The most famous of these was Van Dyck, 22 years
younger than Rubens, who became a master at 12.
Collaborative
work was acknowledged. Rubens painted most
of Prometheus Bound,
but Snyders was called upon to paint the eagle pecking out the hero's
innards. Rubens and Breugel produced a dozen paintings together.
Breugel was responsible for the landscapes in pictures such as Adam
and Eve in Paradise.
Rubens, with Snyders, Promeseus Bound
Sometimes
Rubens’s assistants painted part of a picture, which Rubens
finished — and the part they painted might be a little or a
lot, depending upon the picture and the backlog of pressing work.
Rubens
loved grandiose formats but hated smaller paintings. He was the
creator of the Baroque style — vivid, dramatic expression,
violent action, movement, emotion, strong contrasts of shadow with
rich, energy-infusing colors. “He was tossing out colossal
makebelieves which are magnified symphonies of movement and color,
and portraits which are majestic transcriptions of the flesh.”
(Bryson Burroughs)
Characteristically
he would sketch his compositions in chalk with a rapid, sure hand.
He would indicate colors. In the classic sense of the word he was a
cartoonist. His painters would come along and paint in the areas laid
out ... doing so in the manner and fashion of Rubens. He would check
the work, make suggestions, occasionally retouch a little,
occasionally rework the whole surface.
Sometimes
the studio painters made new replicas of work already done. There was
always a good market for these.
If
a painting were particularly well executed by a shop painter,
Rubens might sign it himself, even though he had
never otherwise touched the canvas. It is doubtful that anything ever
left the studio officially
without Rubens’s imprimatur.
The
problem of true or tainted Rubens does not stop at Peter Paul’s
studio door. As his fame spread — and not even his workshop
could meet demand — imitators, copiers, and forgers gushed
out on every side. There were crowds of buyers who were perfectly
content to pay less than going rates to have something just like
Rubens.
No
doubt some bootlegging came from painters within Rubens's own team —
the apprentice or young master who, the day's work done, would
trundle off to his own tiny studio to turn out clandestine Rubens.
Rubens
was hardly the first to introduce workshop painting to art, but
because of the contribution of his personal fame and public clamor
for his art, painters trained personally in his style, free-wheeling
dealers of Antwerp merchants, and Van Schoonbake’s Friday
Market gave the commerce in art fakes the most vigorous impetus it
had over known.
As
many as 3500 paintings are attributed to Rubens, entirely or
in part, says French authority Guy Isnard. For a
man who was so grossly occupied in other pursuits, that mountain of
baroque canvases seems impossible. For a painter of the time,
400 works would have been a splendid production.
We
recognise in the arts that some people are prodigious while others
are able to finish only small output. From
the searching minds of Will Durant and his
wife has come an acclaimed and creative interpretation
of civilization that runs into millions of words; the solid
reputation of novelist Richard Hughes rests upon three short novels
published decades apart.
Hayden
composed 104 symphonies, Beethoven only
nine. By painters Da Vinci, Jan Vermeer, Caravaggio, Bonington, and
Seurat only a few pictures exist. Titian lived to 93 but produced
only 140; Raphael died at 36 but left 200; Giorgione died at 33 and
no more than 12 attributions are certain.
But
3500 pictures! If indeed there were only
3500 purported Rubens in the world, the
collector's task might be easier. As we have seen, these 3500 were
augmented by thousands of fakes, the majority of which, fortunately,
have disappeared from commerce and perhaps from the face of the
earth.
Ordinarily
just a few debatable pictures from Rubens’s workshop would be
enough to keep scholars in quandaries over true and fake for
generations to come. One American art historian, however, would have
us believe that virtually all 3500
works attributed to Rubens by everyone else are forgeries!
The
American historian was an expatriate researcher named Charles
Rogers Bordley. Writing from Paris he sought to
prove that the output attributed to Rubens
really came from Rubens's Chief of Atelier Frans Snyders.
You know the story: Bacon wrote Shakespeare.
According
to Bordley, Snyders produced masterpieces which served to promote the
fame of some of his contemporaries, above all that of the shrewdest
businessman in the whole history of art, Rubens.
Bordley
makes the question of frauds, fakes, and counterfeits
impossibly more complex. Although he spent nearly
30 years developing his thesis — during which time he must have
been doing something else — it is not much accepted. He
published his claims first in Art Digest
in 1943 and since has gained remarkably
few adherents.
Bordley
contends that after Snyders was named Principal Painter to the Court
he was bound to serve the court exclusively. Velasquez received a
similar honor in Spain and wasted much of his life performing menial
artistic errands. Rubens refused the honoring encumbrance.
In
1609-10, Rubens supposedly proposed that he
could dispose of Snyder’s bootleg work if it appeared to come
from Rubens: Snyders would paint; Rubens would sell.
A
crafty master of exploitation, Rubens never let anyone think other
than it was his stuff. Fortunately for Rubens,
Bordley’s thesis can be shot full of holes — and has been
many times.
In
contrast, just one relatively recent (1967) citation, from C. W.
Wedgewood, The World of Rubens:
“During Rubens’s most productive years the majority of
his paintings were in every sense his own work.”
Yes,
Miss Wedgewood, but you innocently beg the question: which were
his paintings?
Danish
physician, Otto Sperling, who visited Rubens in 1621, was the
first to declare that Rubens was merely a factory. When Sperling
entered the Antwerp studio Rubens was listening to someone read
Tacitus, dictating a letter, and painting.
In today’s terms, listening to Tacitus while working is no
different than working with the radio on.
What
miffed Sperling was that Rubens continued to do all these things
while engaging in conversation. Sperling’s bellyaching gave
cause to art historians like Bordley who would maintain — too
strongly — that Rubens painted very little by his own hand.
Admittedly
it is a well attested fact that on occasion if an assistant painted a
Rubens-like painting that the master
completely approved, the master would sign his own name to it: Peter
Paul Rubens. Yet this act was considered the supreme compliment, not
forgery.
Today
our philosophy of art has changed. Collectors prefer a painting done
entirely by Rubens's hand rather than one cartooned by him and
partially painted by another.
In
1618, Rubens proposed to give Sir Dudley
Carleton, British ambassador to Holland, paintings in exchange for
Carleton's collection of antiquities, most of which were
fragments of statues from the late part of the Greco-Roman period.
He
wrote Carleton, “I have the good fortune to actually have in my
home some pieces of the first order... I am prepared to give you
paintings by my own hand marked on the attached list valued
altogether at 6,000 florins — the usual cash price — in
exchange.”
Scholars
know Rubens took occasional liberties with the truth in describing
the amount of his participation; even so the list is especially
interesting because it demonstrates how his studio worked.
500
florins: Prometheus
Bound to Mount Caucasus, at whose liver
an eagle pecks with his beak. Painted by me, except for the eagle,
which is by Snyders. (6' x 8')
600
florins: Daniel
with the Lions. These are painted from
life. Painted entirely by me. (6' x 12')
600
florins: Leopards
Painted from Life, with satyrs and
nymphs. Painted by myself, except for a fine landscape, which was
done an expert specialist. (9' x 10')
500
florins:
Leda with Swan and Cupid.
Painted by me. (7' x 10")
500
florins: The
Crucifixion, life size. It is perhaps
the best thing I have done. (12' x 6') Probably a studio copy despite
what Rubens says.
1200
florins: The
Last Judgment. Begun by one of my
pupils, from a much larger painting that I did for His Serene
Highness the Prince of Neuberg. (The latter paid me 3500 florins cash
for it.) The painting is not finished but I am determined to go over
it again entirely myself, so that it might pass as an original. (13'
x 91)
500
florins: St.
Peter Removing the Stater from the Fish in Order to Pay the Tax.
Surrounding fishermen painted from life. By my hand. (7' x 8')
600
florins: The
Hunt, begun by one of my pupils. It
represents horsemen and lions and is painted from a canvas I did for
His Serene Highness the Duke of Bavaria. I shall go over it
completely myself. (8' x 11')
500
florins each: Christ
and the Twelve Apostles. Panels painted
by my pupils from originals owned by the Duke of Lerma. I shall go
over them completely. (4 x 3')
600
florins: A
Painting Representing Achilles Dressed as a Woman.
Painted by my best pupil. I have gone over it completely. It is a
very pleasant picture in which are seen many beautiful women. (9' x
10')
300
florins: St.
Sebastian Nude. By my own hand. (7' x
4")
300
florins: Suzanna.
Painted by one of my pupils and gone over completely by me. (7' x 5')
Carleton
took 1000 florins in paintings and the balance in cash and
tapestries. Three months after the exchange, Sir Dudley offered them
to the King of Denmark’s dealer and described them all
as coming from the very hand of the master, which of course they did
from point of commercial origin but did not quite from point of
artistic origin.
Rubens
did well on the transaction, too, since the 140 marbles formed the
bulk of the collection he sold to Buckingham for 100,000 florins.
A
century ago the Swiss scholar J. Burckhardt divided Rubens’s
paintings into six categories which have since become the standard
classification not only for Rubens but for all workshop painters:
Pictures
painted entirely by the hand of Rubens.
Pictures
which Rubens sketched for his assistants, supervised, and
subsequently touched up.
Works
in which a formal division of labor was prescribed, such as a
Rubens-Breugel collaboration.
Workshop
pictures painted in the style and spirit of the mast but by his
assistants and with little participation by Rubens.
School
copies without any Rubens participation.
Copies
done by other schools and workshops, sometimes to order.
This
system is the epitome of Germanic clarity. Admittedly, art historians
and aestheticians may argue about the placement of particular
pictures, but the categories are clear and sensible. The French, on
the other hand, in their headlong plunge into nuanceful pigeonholing
(no nation ever took more delight in shuffling the various
classifications of sins and punishments) have a more demanding system
for the judgment of copies.
It was set down by a gentleman of the great Gallic name of Dézallier
d’Argenville.
Servile
copies, containing mistakes, bad taste, and overall lack of
vitality.
Facile
copies which are not faithful and carry within themselves the
evidence of falsity but are done by someone of talent, like some of
Rubens’s copies.
Faithful
copies done by a facile and even hand distinguishable from
the true original only by a person of remarkable eye, again like
some of Rubens’s copies.
School
copies done under the eye of the master and retouched in essential
places by the master, these retouched places shining throng wherever
added to the picture.
Completely
retouched copies, which then for all
practical purpose become original.
Replica
copies in which the artist himself paints a copy of his own original
work.
Besides
these there is another category, which Dézallier d’Argenville
readily admits: copies
of copies.
Consider
the number of collaborators and/or immediate imitators of Rubens,
besides Snyders, Van Dyck, and Breugel. There were Jan Fyt
(like Snyders a specialist in painting animals);
Paul de Vos (like Snyders an expert in rendering hunting scenes);
Lucas van Linden (famous for foliage); Gaspare de Crayer; Lucas Van
Udden; Theodore Van Thulden; Erasmus Quellin; Abraham Diepenbeeck;
Jean Wildens; Simon de Vos; Paul de Vos; Conelius de Vos; Juste
d’Egmont; Martin Pepyn; Joachim Von Sandrart;Peter Strudel;
Jacques Moermans; Guillaume Fanncels; Francois Mouters; Déodat
del Monte; Sachtleven; J. Boeckhorst; Theodore Boeyermann; Gonzales
Coques; J. Cossiers; Luc Franchoys; Jacques Fougières; J. Van
der Hoeck; P van ... the list goes on and on.
Further
complication: many of these man collaborated with each other,
and a substantial number of them had assistants and students of
their own — all painting à la Rubens.
It
is fascinating to note how Rubens’
double gift of art and diplomacy served to spread his fame and
standing and thus to skyrocket the international demand for his work,
at the same time providing ammunition for the Bordleys who would have
the world believe Rubens had no time for painting and was forced to
resort to rampant forgery.
Probably
it would be impossible for a forger today to paint a fake
Rubens and successfully sell it as the real thing
if the prospective purchaser were to stand the expense of expert
evaluation, including the latest in measurement of pigment age
through radioactive analysis.
The
problem for today's collector lies squarely with all these old
contemporary, or nearly contemporary copies and counterfeits. Here
the collector must rely upon expert connoisseurship, which sometimes
is but a mandarin exercise.
Lawrence Jeppson is an art consultant, organizer and curator of art exhibitions, writer, editor
and publisher, lecturer, art historian, and appraiser. He is America's leading authority on
modern, handwoven French tapestries. He is expert on the works of William Henry Clapp, Nat
Leeb, Tsing-fang Chen, and several French artists.
He is founding president of the non-profit Mathieu Matégot Foundation for Contemporary
Tapestry, whose purview encompasses all 20th-century tapestry, an interest that traces back to
1948. For many years he represented the Association des Peintres-Cartonniers de Tapisserie and
Arelis in America.
Through the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, the American Federation of
Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and his own Art Circuit Services he has been a contributor to
or organizer of more than 200 art exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Taiwan.
He owns AcroEditions, which publishes and/or distributes multiple-original art. He was co-founder and artistic director of Collectors' Investment Fund.
He is the director of the Spring Arts Foundation; Utah Cultural Arts Foundation, and the Fine
Arts Legacy Foundation
Lawrence is an early-in-the-month home teacher, whose beat is by elevator. In addition, he has spent the past six years hosting and promoting reunions of the missionaries who served in the French Mission (France, Belgium, and Switzerland) during the decade after WWII.