Rubens stripped down

In 1621, Peter Paul Rubens wrote to William Trumbull, angling to land a commission to decorate the huge new Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace in London.

“I confess that by natural instinct I am more inclined to execute very large works rather than small curiosities,” Rubens wrote. “My talent is such that no undertaking, no matter how large in size, how varied in subject, has ever exceeded my confidence.”

That confidence, of course, was immense. And it wasn’t misplaced. At the age of 44, Rubens was already one of the most highly sought-after artists of his time, a Habsburg court painter who counted among his studio assistants Anthony van Dyck. He was also a diplomat who spoke five languages fluently and was at home in palaces from Mantua to Madrid. The archduke of Austria was his son’s godfather.

Rubens eventually got the Whitehall commission, creating a series of nine paintings celebrating the reign of James I. He also had a hand in negotiating the truce between England and Spain about the same time.

“I am the busiest and most harassed man in the world,” Rubens once complained.

He was, critics have long noted, too busy to actually paint much of the art that his large studio churned out in his name. It is no small irony, then, that it is not the large works that made his fame but rather the small curiosities that Rubens dashed off himself that most tellingly reveal the artist’s hand.

Three dozen of these oil sketches (of 450 that survive) are the subject of a show at the UC Berkeley Art Museum called “Drawn by the Brush.” The exhibition -- which was co-organized with the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, in Greenwich, Conn., and the Cincinnati Art Museum -- runs through May 15 (www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/ex hibits/rubens) before moving to Cincinnati, its last stop. The popularity of work by the artist’s own hand was underscored by the crowds at the recent exhibition of Rubens’ drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The sketches in the Berkeley show range from Impressionistic jottings to lavishly detailed set pieces, all contained in small frames, all giving evidence of the painter’s ceaseless vitality. Rubens, observed his contemporary William Sanderson, “in an instant in the liveliness of spirit, with a nimble hand, would force out his overcharged brain into description so as not to be contained in the compass of ordinary practice, but by a violent driving out of passion. The commotions of the mind could not be cooled by slow performance.”

Yet while the sketches can be marvelously creative, scholar Nico van Hout notes, they were only preparatory vehicles for the fully realized paintings.

“Perhaps Rubens,” he writes in the catalog, “would find it incomprehensible that the public today values his unfinished preparatory works more than his completed paintings, which was the result of an intense wrestling with form, color, and the application of the brush.”

Grounded in the classics

Rubens was born in 1577 and received a good classical education that he would draw upon for mythological images for the rest of his life. At 13 he was apprenticed to an artist in Antwerp, and at 23 he set off for Italy to soak up the achievements of Titian and Tintoretto. Almost immediately, Rubens was working for Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, a great collector and patron in Mantua. The duke put Rubens to work copying masters in his collection and then sent him off as his emissary to Spain.

One of Rubens’ earliest known oil sketches dates from about 1601, when he was working in Rome. He painted a study of a young man in a dramatic, Caravaggesque pose, head turned, mouth agape, eyes locked on some unseen spectacle. Rubens often created such isolated, stock imagery, which he would use later in his grand projects. The boy’s face, for example, pops up in canvas after canvas for the next decade.

Two decades later, Rubens painted a pensive “Head of a Negro,” which shows a man gazing down, his dark face lightly painted, the background barely sketched in, his white shirt collar highlighted with a few vigorous daubs of paint. It’s an intimate and moving picture and a rare oil study that cannot be linked to any larger painting project.

In 1608 Rubens left Italy to return to Antwerp, where his mother was dying. He opened a workshop and was soon the court painter to the Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella. Another important patron was Nicolaas Rockox, a wealthy burgemeester who commissioned a large painting of Samson and Delilah, an oil sketch for which is on display. The sketch, which probably served as a model for studio assistants, depicts Samson slumbering on Delilah’s lap while her co-conspirators shear off his locks. The two central figures are powerfully and sensually painted: Delilah’s breasts exposed, Samson a homage to Michelangelo, his massive arm as big as a tree trunk, falling flaccidly across his seductress’ red dress and dramatically splitting the lower half of the picture in two. The background architecture and supporting characters are merely notational, details left for the workshop to fill in.

It was a good time to be an artist in Antwerp, which was then part of the Spanish Netherlands. The Low Countries had been racked by religious wars for years, with Protestant mobs sacking Catholic churches and destroying altarpieces and other paintings that they believed were idolatrous. Rubens’ father had converted to Calvinism before his son was born but returned to the Catholic church when Peter Paul was 10. The son became the Counter-Reformation artist par excellence, a pictorial propagandist whose brush celebrated the ritual and authority that Luther had rebelled against.

In 1620, for example, Rubens got a job to paint three altarpieces and 39 ceiling paintings for a new Jesuit church in Antwerp. A century later the church was hit by lightning and the paintings were all destroyed by fire. Some oil sketches, however, survive. One is “Last Supper,” in which the viewer looks up at Jesus and his Apostles engaging in an animated conversation, with a basket of bread and a jug of wine placed low on the steps leading up to the table, icons of the Counter-Reformation that glow with their own divine light.

The next year Rubens won the commission from James I to decorate Whitehall Palace, a task that would take more than a decade to finish and that is his only decorative scheme still in place. One of the simplest and most charming sketches in the exhibition is “Two Figure Studies,” thought to be an early exercise for the palace. Two separate sketches share the panel and almost seem to be interacting: a fleet, blue-robed Mercury bounding toward an elderly, snoozing yeoman in red.

Artist and statesman

Between painting projects, Rubens traveled around Europe, helping to negotiate treaties between England and France and Spain. He bought a castle. King Charles knighted him -- not for his art but for his diplomacy. (Charles would later be executed under Rubens’ paintings in Whitehall Palace.)

Yet for all his success, Rubens was still enthrall to his artistic masters. Reveling in his patron Philip IV’s fantastic collection of Titians, Rubens painted his own copies like an art student in a museum.

In 1638 Philip gave Rubens a big new project: creating more than 60 paintings for the royal hunting lodge outside Madrid. In two months Rubens dashed off three score modelli, and his studio cranked out the paintings in a fury of activity.

“The final products of all this haste make a disappointing impression in the Prado,” writes Bruce Executive Director Peter Sutton in the catalog. “But the brilliance of invention, the dynamism, and the passionate humanity of the oil sketches are a true delight.”

One of these is “Hercules Strangling the Nemean Lion,” in which the 62-year-old artist painted a bravura scene of man and animal in mortal combat.

In 1640 the frenzy stopped. His hands paralyzed by gout, Rubens was unable to paint for the first time in half a century. Three days before his death, he made a will leaving all his drawings to his children in case they should want to be artists. As valuable as his large estate was, nothing seemed more valuable to Rubens than what he drew with his own hands.