Rubens: A Touch of Brilliance

11:37am Friday 23rd January 2004

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Those who see modern art as infantile mucking-around with paint and clay - and not a patch on the proper paintings of masters centuries ago - will find plenty of grist for milling at the Peter Paul Rubens exhibition in Somerset House.

In his lifetime Rubens was acclaimed as Europe's greatest painter. He was commissioned by the highest nobility in Europe, including the magnificent ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall for Charles I, and the Medici Cycle (of 24 large canvasses) for the widowed queen of France.

The Touch of Brilliance exhibition in Somerset House's Hermitage Rooms pulls together preparatory materials for some of Rubens' most ambitious projects, including his early altarpieces for the cathedral at Antwerp and final great cycle for the triumphal entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in April 1635.

The Hermitage Rooms provide an excellent venue, the space having been created to show works from the collections of St Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, many of which feature here.

The process of creating such vast cycles is laid bare in the exhibition, from studio conception to final execution.

We see his initial grey or brown grisailles experiments, mapping the structure of compositions on a bit of wooden board; then the full-colour oil sketches - often as many as two or three large paintings, full of detail, sampling differing arrangements of characters and buildings; and finally an example photograph from the cycle itself, showing the finished article in situ.

It is an unusual insight into the working methods of a remarkable artist to which we are not often treated.

From this vast stock of preparatory works it may seem, as some would hold, that the old masters worked far harder than their modern day counterparts, but this exhibition also shows Rubens himself was not beyond taking a shortcut here and there.

Often there was so much work to be done in transferring the germ of the idea from the preliminary sketches to the vast panels, ceilings and canvasses demanded by Rubens' patrons that the master did little of the final painting himself, leaving it to his skilled assistants and pupils.

Watch out also for the duplication of some faces, characters, and even scenes lifted wholesale from one cycle and dropped into another, later, for an entirely different commission.

There may well be even more parallels between the methods of the old masters and those of the Brit-artists.

Putting a mucky bed in an art gallery may seem a trifling, but it could be worth holding out to see an exhibition of preparatory work for one of Hirst's animals in a tank, or the laborious process behind such an intricate sculpture as the Chapman brothers' Sex.

Have to wait till the Russians acquire those too though, no doubt.

Rubens: A touch of Brilliance
Until 8th February 2004
Hermitage Rooms, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
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