Peter Paul Rubens

• Paintings

LANDSCAPE

In fact, in what I find to be the most beautiful amongst his landscapes, the "Chateau de Steen", in the National Gallery, it is said that it is the first painting in which the artist attempts to paint the sun. Whether that is true or not, this landscape's genius is, for me, the fact that it combines the intimate with the panoramic, my personal favourite aspect of landscape painting, which made Nepal my favourite and most inspiring place to paint landscape that I ever encountered. In that extraordinary country, one often finds oneself gazing upon a magnificent panorama from atop a mountain, and in the foreground a hundred or two feet below you will see a hill top with a lovely little farm surrounded by a cluster of trees. That's what I mean by mixing the intimate with the panoramic. Anyway, in the Chateau de Steen, Rubens has painted, in the middle distance and to the left of the composition, his favourite home, which was just outside Antwerp. The intimate aspect of this great painting is a horse-drawn carriage that is just leaving the chateau, with members of his family - surely including his young wife Helen - and veering off to the left of the canvas giving us a sense of life and movement, enhanced by the hunter who, in the foreground, is creeping along with his matchlock (gun), probably on the lookout for a deer or fox. And then, from the centre to the right of the painting, all the rest of the space is taken up with the panoramic, a magnificent and brilliantly rendered landscape of field upon field disappearing into the far distance. The illusion of space was never better captured on canvas. Since it is in the National Gallery, where I more or less grew up as an artist, walking through those fields until I disappeared into the infinity of my imagination was my first real artistic journey.

PORTRAITURE and the NUDE

A little sadly, in this day when skinny is the thing, people find it hard to enjoy the voluptuousness of Rubens' nudes, for which he is most famous. I cannot stress too much the importance of the following: When looking at a work of art, especially when you know it is by one of the greatest artists in history, try, at the same time as simply taking in the image, bearing in mind the period in which the work was created. Rubens neither painted in the twentieth century, nor did he paint for it. In his day, no one would even give a second glance to the girls who define beauty for many people today; they liked a girl to have flesh on her bones. Also let it be said that there is a lot more to the The Nude, in painting, than simply their outline. There is the texture of flesh, skin, and then there is the colour of it, especially difficult to render when giving the impression of light falling upon it. And no one in the history of Art captured the feeling of light on flesh more brilliantly than Peter Paul Rubens. His canvases are populated by people whose very breath you can almost feel, so easily and flowingly are they painted. His palette, the actual mixture of colours he used to achieve this, were different from any other artist; he used a brighter yellow and red, and also applied more white highlights than any other painter. I have spent my life using both his palette and the special mixture (medium) he invented to mix with his colours to make them quick drying.

Chapeau de Paille Rubens

Skip in a Golden Turban Christian

Helen with her Son Rubens

The reason he required such a medium was that he was the fastest painter ever to live; many of his panels would be painted in a single day. Unlike most other Masters around his time or before him, Rubens most often used a technique known as "prima volta^•." While he occasionally used the most accepted technique of his day, which was building up a work in semi-transparent layers of paint known as glazes, more often than not, due to the speed with which his most fluent hand allowed him to work, he would work on his panel with the immediacy of a sketch. But such a Master was he that these technically speaking sketches, give us the feeling of highly finished works. The greatest examples of this are some of his portraits. "Le Chapeau de Paille" and the two breathlessly beautiful "sketches" of Helen with one or two of their little children, one in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the other in the Louvre in Paris. These three paintings, amongst my favourite Rubens paintings, would have each been achieved in less than one full day's work. I use the medium Rubens invented, more or less his palette, his choice of colours, and I work at high speed. Until the last few years, when I started working on quite large and complex compositions, I rarely spent more than a day, two at most, on a single work. In fact, one of my favourite portraits I ever painted was of my friend Skip, which I called "The Golden Turban" it took about five hours to paint. But as Whistler (or was it Sargent?) said in a famous court case, in which he was defending himself against a client who was accusing him for having charged too much money for what only took him a few hours to paint: "Yes, it is true that I painted this work in a few hours...and seventeen years of study."

As for portraiture, I have not accepted any commissions - well, with very few exceptions - to paint portraits for many years, for very specific reasons. When portraits first came about, the reason for them was...

a) ...to create a likeness that was symbolic, so the Soul of the potentate who was being portrayed would continue to "live" after his physical death.

b) Later, from medieval times, was added the reason to allow future generations to have an idea of what the dignitary being portrayed looked like, and some idea also of the costumes worn in those times and even a little information regarding their lifestyle would be included in the background of a portrait. We know precisely that one Charles Laughton was the spitting image of Henry VIII only due to the fact that Holbein made the fact patently evident in his brilliant portrait of that king.

c) Later still, by about Rembrandt's time, the upper classes, known as the burghers, finally decided to join the ranks of the greatest amongst aristocracy and have them selves portrayed. At that time, the third reason for portraiture to exist became as a status symbol.

So, we have three raison d'etres for portraiture to be taken seriously as a branch of Art. But we now live in an age where we have not only photography but video cameras that will show us what everyone looks like and in seconds! We can know every single facet of absolutely anyone's face, likeness, even their body and "costumes" at the flick of a switch, a button or a lever. And thus the only reason for portraiture that remains is as a status symbol; someone has enough money to pay someone else to come and portray them by hand. Someone who hopefully has the ability to do so well, which at the same time as photography entered the picture, started becoming more and more rare, perhaps because art students started finding, as I did, the reasons to do so had become pretty flimsy. And so I stopped accepting commissions, and eventually desisted from painting portraits altogether, with the one exception being portraits of my wife.

Helen in a Fur Wrap Rubens

Fanny in a Fur Wrap Christian

I have always found the most beautiful portraits painted by any Master to be those of their wives and lovers. Of Rubens and Rembrandt, perhaps the two greatest portraitists ever, this was particularly the case. Each was married twice - due in each case to the demise of the first wife - and each painted the most sublimely beautiful portraits of each of their wives.

By the time I met Fanny and by my greatest luck of my life she became my wife, I had stopped painting portraits altogether, with no exceptions any more, my attitude towards portraiture having arrived at the stage where I found the genre, used in this present age of technology, completely invalid. I took many photos of Fanny and loved them. However, after some years, loving her face to the degree that I did, I started missing having her precious image on our walls in portraits, and I didn't feel one could frame and hang photographs, no matter how spectacular, in quite the same way. And so I evolved an idea. I would return to periods when photography didn't exist. I would paint her as any of my favourite Masters might have painted her. I felt my unique closeness to them, having been taught by them since the age of ten, would enable me to repaint rather than just copy, my favourite portraits they had painted - but with Fanny's face on those paintings, instead of the wives of the masters who had painted the original version. Of course it could have been an extremely kitsh idea, but I believed it was my very closeness to the Masters that would avoid that trap, and for me, it seems to have worked.

I started off this idea with one of my favourite portraits of all time, which also combines with the Nude. The portrait of "Helen in a Fur Wrap" by Rubens. Helen would have been between 18 and 20 years old when she modelled for that, Fanny was more than twice that age. I had no intention of trying to make her look like her teenage counterpart, on the contrary I thought how wonderful it would be to give Helen an "Art Mother." Fanny's incredible sense of humour burst through the painting and gave it a feeling of youngness while at the same time not falling into any of the traps of superficial flattery. Helen's legs were just too full of dimples even for me, and so although I kept her top half, Fanny modelled her own legs, as well as the head. The rest of the painting, including its size, is more or less identical to the Rubens original, which hangs in the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. Our version has hung for some years now in our bedroom, and is actually the first thing we see on awakening every morning; it still causes us great pleasure, as do the other portraits I have painted of Fanny since that first one, which I will mention in later articles. We also believe that Rubens, rather than being in the slightest offended, would be as delighted by the whole idea as we are. He was so much in love with Helen - who was 16 when he married her at 54 - that he would well understand my feelings for my "Helen."

Anthony Christian