Helena Fourment with Her Son Frans

Transcription

I’m Teresa Posada, curator of the department of Flemish painting and the Northern Schools. Today I will be talking about this landscape by Rubens, which in my opinion is one of the artist’s most moving works and one that best reveals Rubens’s temperament, that vitality and energy he possessed as a person and which is evident here in his painting. As you know, Rubens was the great history painter, a great painter of mythological narratives, biblical stories, the finest 17th-century master in that sense and one of the best European Baroque painters. Rubens was also extremely cosmopolitan and travelled a great deal, undertaking diplomatic missions here in Spain and in England. He was also a painter of landscapes but when Rubens painted landscapes he did so for himself. Of course, all his paintings, all his mythological and history scenes and scenes of peasants have landscape backgrounds but they are not landscapes, they are paintings with figures with landscape backgrounds, in which the key elements are the figures. So what do I mean when I say that Rubens painted these landscapes for himself? Because he only had them at home. Rubens never sold his landscapes, they were always in his house or he gave them to friends, and furthermore almost all of them, although not this one, were painted on panels, using pieces of wood that he had at home, which he joined together to paint the landscape. If he needed another piece in order to add an element, such as another tree, he just added another piece of wood that he had in his studio. This proves that they were not made to be sold because he couldn’t have sold supports of this type made from left over, stuck together pieces. This is one of the few landscapes by Rubens that is painted on canvas. It was painted after the 1630s when Rubens returned from his diplomatic missions. He married for the second time, to Helena Fourment. He bought a country house, a castle, and practically retired there to live, and it was there, surrounded by the countryside and nature that he painted most of his landscapes. In this case the scene depicted is "The Hunt for the Calydonian Boar" or "Atalanta and Meleager". Like all the mythological tales that derive from Ovid, this one is from the "Metamorphoses". The King of Calydon had forgotten to make an offering or to pay the annual tribute to the goddess Diana. Angered by this lack of respect on the King’s part, Diana sent an enormous boar to his realm that destroyed his crops, destroyed his whole kingdom and began to ruin the King. At this point his son Meleager suggested organising a hunt in order to kill the beast. Rubens depicts the moment of maximum tension in the entire story: the moment when Atalanta throws herself forward with her bow and shoots the arrow at the boar, which sinks into its neck there as the dogs spring forward to kill it. The boar tries to defend itself but it is almost dead and at the same time Meleager, the King’s son, advances from the other side in order to finish it off with his spear. This is the moment of maximum tension and drama in the story. It is the struggle for life, and the drama of the figures in movement, shown at their most dynamic, is accompanied by a sense of all of nature also in movement, as reflected in the painting. These trees, which are dark masses and openings through which the sunlight filters. This struggle between light and darkness, between life and death, in other words the same struggle that the figures are undergoing, is translated into the natural world. Essentially it is the power of nature, which reduces the figures to the minimum. Look at any of Rubens’s figures and get to know his art well and you will see that he is a painter not of large figures but of majestic ones. Here they are small figures of an incredible beauty, with an incredible dynamism and perfection in the anatomy but he reduces them to the minimum and also fuses them with the landscape elements. You have to look very carefully as they could be roots, or branches, it is a complete fusion of the human being into the background, who becomes one more natural element. There is no distinction, no hierarchy, we all form part of that natural world, that nature which can overcome us, whose strength is greater than man’s and this is what Rubens, in a totally modern way, has aimed to reflect, in other words, not a setting but just that: nature with all its energy, its struggle, its lights, shadows, life, death, which reflect or provide the space for this dramatic story of the death of this great wild boar. None of Rubens’s landscapes are dated, including this one, nor are they signed because, as I said earlier, there were for him or his friends, so it is very difficult to date them and to say which come before and after which. There are more than thirty landscapes. One has to analyse the background landscapes in other paintings in order to determine the moment when they were painted. If you look how the trees are painted, that mass of trees with small patches of light filtering through them, where the leaves are not separated but created from broad brushstrokes, it can be used to date the landscape between 1635 and 1640. A surprising aspect of Rubens and one that makes him truly one of the great landscape painters of all times is his way of painting the landscape. If you look around these galleries afterwards you will see how he distances himself from what his contemporaries were doing. Look at Brueghel’s landscapes, with their small, detailed brushstrokes with all the leaves painted one by one, the details one by one, the feathers on the birds… It is astonishing how Rubens achieves this with four brushstrokes, then get close and see how the tree trunks are pure brushstrokes. This highlight is a formless white patch. That patch of light in the depths of the forest, which gives a sense of spatial recession into the far distance, is a yellow brushstroke. This is absolute technical mastery. The use of colour is also different to his contemporaries. At this period he was looking at late Titian. Take a look at Titian in the Museum and at late Titian, which again is this. Rubens, who went to Italy as a young man, had of course encountered the Italian painters, the Venetians, Titian, and admired them profoundly and in the end he looks back and takes up what he had already seen in the background of Titian’s landscapes. The same thing happens, Titian does it because he paints on canvases and not panels. These brushstrokes… Rubens is a painter who liberates all that energy that I mentioned at the start, all that vitality that Rubens must have had, we know that he was an extremely dynamic man, and he releases all that inner force as “bam!”, these brushstrokes, creating the tree, creating the branches… it’s as if he was painting by throwing his entire body into the canvas. I find it marvellous, as if it could have been painted yesterday, it’s totally modern. It’s old, an old story, no painter nowadays would paint it, it no longer has any meaning, but this conception of the landscape, of nature and above all of man as one more element in that wild and savage natural world is what fascinates me about this painting.