Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens was born on 28 June 1577, most probably in Siegen in Westphalia, to the Antwerp lawyer Jan Rubens and Maria Pypelinckx, whose family had left Antwerp for Cologne for religious reasons; he was baptised in Cologne. After his father's death the family returned to Antwerp, around 1589, and the boy received a humanist education before training under the landscape painter Tobias Verhaecht, then Adam van Noort and Otto van Veen. He became a master of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1598. In 1600 he left for Italy, where until 1608 he served Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, worked in Rome, Genoa and Venice, and travelled to Spain on a diplomatic mission in 1603. Recalled by his mother's last illness, he settled in Antwerp, became court painter to Archduke Albert and Infanta Isabella in 1609, and died there on 30 May 1640, worn down by gout.

Rubens combined the Venetian colour of Titian and the muscular energy of Michelangelo, both studied in Italy, with a Flemish feeling for flesh and surface. Back in Antwerp he painted Samson and Delilah (about 1609-10, National Gallery, London) for the mayor Nicolaas Rockox, using the strong contrasts of light and shadow he had seen in Caravaggio, and then The Elevation of the Cross (1610-11, Antwerp Cathedral), the altarpiece that made him the city's leading painter. Between 1622 and 1625 he painted in Antwerp the twenty-four canvases of the Marie de' Medici cycle for the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, now in the Louvre, and installed them himself. Married to Hélène Fourment in 1630, he painted her in several late pictures, and later mythologies such as The Judgement of Paris (about 1632-35, National Gallery, London) show the same ease with the nude.

Rubens ran one of the most productive workshops in Europe, with about twenty assistants and pupils identified. Anthony van Dyck worked with him around 1617-20, while Jacob Jordaens, Frans Snyders and Jan Brueghel the Elder collaborated on his pictures, and engravers such as Lucas Vorsterman and Paulus Pontius spread his compositions across Europe. Michel Jaffé's catalogue lists 1,403 works by his own hand. He was knighted by Charles I in 1630, after Philip IV of Spain had ennobled him in 1624. His example shaped Van Dyck, Watteau and Delacroix, and the later quarrel between the colourist Rubenists and the draughtsmen Poussinists took his name. For a painter in oils who reproduces him, this body of work offers warm, luminous flesh, saturated reds and golds, and a lively play of light against shadow.

Biographical details on Wikipedia.