the problems of his art more intelligently than before, to have brought to his work something of the quality that we call genius. The one gift that the gods denied him was poetic fancy, a quality that would have kept him from the portrayal of types and incidents that we are apt to regard, with or without justification, as ugly, that would have made his classicism pleasing to eyes that read it at its true value. But Rubens was one of the men who have to fight, not against failure but against success; and the shrewd practical nature that made him what he was served as an effective barrier against acquisition of the qualities that would have lifted him to the region that always remained just beyond his reach.

1628 was a very interesting year in the painter’s life, for he was sent on a mission to the Court of Spain, where he met Velazquez, who was instructed to show him all the art treasures of the capital. What would we not give to-day for an authentic account of the conversations that these men must have held together? Rubens was at the zenith of his fame, if not of his achievement, Velazquez was unknown save in Seville and Madrid, and was fighting against every class of disadvantage on the road to belated recognition. Let those who sneer at Rubens and can find no good about him, remember that he it was who turned Velazquez’ attention to Italy. Rubens found time to paint portraits of several members of the royal family, and these works are fine likenesses enough, though they do not pretend to rival Velazquez’ achievements in the same field. The diplomatic business was conducted with so much skill that Philip entrusted his visitor with a mission to Paris and London. In the last-named city Rubens was received by Charles I., who conferred a knighthood upon him, and approved of his commission to decorate the banqueting-chamber at Whitehall.

Back again in Antwerp, Rubens found his talents sorely tried by the diplomatic developments in which the restless ambition of Maria de Medici involved all the countries subject directly or indirectly to her influence. He found himself compelled to go twice to Holland in the early thirties, but the death of the Infanta Isabel in 1633 removed him awhile from the heated arena of politics. Rubens prepared Antwerp for the visit of the Archduke Ferdinand, the Spanish governor, the city being decorated for this occasion at a cost of 80,000 florins. The work was so successful that the Archduke paid a special visit of congratulation to the artist, who was laid up in his room by an attack of gout. Two or three years later, some warnings that his strength would not hold out much longer availed to turn Rubens from the life of Courts and capitals, and he purchased for himself the Château de Stein, a very beautiful estate that is preserved for us by the delightful picture in the National Gallery. There he settled down for awhile to fulfil certain commissions for the King of Spain, and doubtless had he been permitted to remain in retirement his health would have been the better and his life the longer. But Antwerp could not dispense with the services of her painter-diplomat, and many a time when he would have been in his studio working at his ease, some urgent message from the city would drag him away. In the winter of 1639 he passed some months in Antwerp, working as best he could in the intervals of severe attacks of gout. The King of Spain’s commission was still unfinished, and some feeling that he himself would never be able to complete it led Rubens to engage a larger number of assistants than usual, and to content himself with directing their efforts and supplementing them as occasion arose. He seems to have known that death was near, for he made his will and prepared to meet the end. It came with May in 1640, when the painter was in the sixty-fourth year of a brilliant and useful life.

Rubens was twice married, first to Isabel Brandt, who became his wife when she was eighteen and he was thirty-two, shortly after his return to Antwerp from the service of the Duke of Mantua. A portrait of the two sons this wife bore him may be seen in Vienna. Isabel Brandt did not live to see her boys, Albert and Nicholas, grow to manhood. She died in 1626, some say from the plague that swept Antwerp in that year. Four years later the painter married the beautiful Helena Fourment, when he was fifty-four and she was sixteen, and she survived him. He seems to have been a good and affectionate husband and father. In fact, it is hard to find among the biographers of Rubens anybody who speaks ill of the artist as a man.

V

THE PAINTER’S ART

Turning from a survey of Rubens’ life to a consideration of his art, the three divisions to which his work groups itself naturally, are very clearly seen. Up to the time of his marriage with Isabel Brandt his work may be referred to the first division, and in art it may be said that no man’s earliest pictures are of much consequence save for their promise of higher things. They do little more than mark his progress, record impressions he has received from strong personalities, and mark his own path through the influences of different schools and varied appeals, to the complete expression of himself. Rubens was never a slavish imitator, he never assumed the mantles of the men he admired, as so many great painters have done. Goya, for example, was a man whose range of thought and capacity for receiving impressions were so great that he has painted after the manner of half-a-dozen masters, and there are pictures to be seen in Madrid to-day that are painted with Goya’s brush and recall Fragonard. Such instances may be multiplied, and Rubens is to be admired for the restraint that marked this side of his early work.

From the time of his marriage down to the season when he became recognised on all sides as a diplomatist, let us say roughly from 1610 to 1626, we get the second period, and to this may be referred the greater part of the work that has given offence—the presentation of the coarsest types of men and women in a state of nature—the treatment of some of the grossest incidents in mythological stories in fashion that leaves nothing to the imagination.

We are justified in asking ourselves whether the extraordinary development of the painter’s social and political life did not avail to arrest in late middle age any tendencies he might otherwise have had to express still further the coarser side of classical subjects. By the time he reached the forties, Rubens was the companion and even the trusted counsellor of princes and rulers. Such refinement as Western Europe boasted was to be met in the circles he frequented. The greatest work