Sir Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577—May 30, 1640) was born in the German city of Siegen. Westphalia to Jan Rubens and Maria Pypelincks. His father was a Calvinist, a country of original Belgium Antwerp’s Protestant lawyer, then fled to Germany in order to escape religious persecution. After the death of his father, 12-year-old Rubens followed his mother and returned to his hometown, Antwerp, which was under the rule of Spain. He received a Catholic baptism and religion became an important topic of his career as a painter, he said, “My passion comes from the heavens, not from earthly musings”. When he was a teenager, Rubens was a pageboy in a countess home, so that had the opportunity to receive formal airstocratic education and became multilingual.
In 1600, the artist Rubens travelled to Italy to continue his study of painting. He had painted for the Duke of Mantua and had the opportunity to further refine his artistic quality and level of education. Rubens’s painting style had been poring over ancient Rome and improve his drawing skills through imitation paintings of masters. During this period, Rubens’s painting style had been basically mature, adding to his excellent paintings and was regarded as a sleek man, he was promoted by Ambassador Duke and accessed frequently to visit cities in Span and Italy. With financial support from the Duke, Rubens travelled to Rome by way of Florence in 1601. There, he studied classical Greek and Roman art and copied works of the Italian masters. Tubens travelled to Spain on a diplomatic massion in 1603, he studied the extensive collections of Raphael and Titian that had been collected by Philip Ⅱ there. He also painted an equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma during his stay, the journey marked the first of many during his career that combined art and diplomacy. He returned to Italy in 1604 and remined for the next four years. The artist Rubens painted numerous portraits as well. With Rubens’s painting stle in the portrait of Maria di Antonio Serra Pallavicini, it had an influence on later paintings.
But upon hearing of his mother’s illness in 1608, Rubens planned his departure from Italy for Antwerp. However, she died before he arrived home. In 1610, Rubens moved into a new house and studio that designed by himself. Now the Rubens huis Museum, the Italian-influenced villa in the centre of Antwerp accommodated his workshop, where he and his apparentices made most of the paintings, and his personal art collection and library, both among the most extensive in Antwerp. The artist Rubens, also began a book illustrating the palaces in the city, which was published in 1622. Rubens’s last decade was spent in and around Antwep. Major works for foreign patroons still occupied him such as the ceiling paintings for the Banqueting House at Inigo Jones’s Palace of Whitehall, but he also explored more personal artistic directions.
In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Helena, who inspired the voluptuous figures in pieces of Rubens’s late work and gave birth to five children for him, though the youngest one was born eight months after his chronic gout on May 30, 1640. Since the latter half of seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century, Rubens’s painting style became a popular style in France, advocating that colors were more important than lines. Vivid colors always attracted viewers’ eyes, aren’t attracted by them?Oil painting reproductions showed on our site are waiting for you, our artist will copy every work displayed on our site as long as you want !