Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with an Avenue of Trees

[music]

0:00:06.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and we have an opportunity to look at an amazing painting by one of the most famous painters in all of Western art history, Peter Paul Rubens. This is a landscape. And usually when we think about Rubens, we think about these grand religious statements or grand mythological statements, but this is a much more intimate image.

0:00:30.7 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: We don’t think of him as much as a landscapist. He did about 60 landscape paintings, most of them at the end of his life, when he retired from courtly service, when he retired from being a diplomat, and he bought a country estate, spent his summers there, but he still had a drive to paint, and it seems like that drive was located on the landscape and the landscape that he owned.

0:00:54.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: The artist had been wildly successful, commercially successful, and he maintained his very productive painting workshop even as he retired to this manor house.

0:01:04.6 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: Rubens was prolific in part because he owned or operated a workshop, but even when he didn’t need to do that anymore, he continued to paint. He had this almost insatiable drive to translate what he saw and what he thought onto a two-dimensional surface.

0:01:20.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: And look at what he’s giving us here. I have this opportunity to see how he sees the landscape, a landscape that he’s purchased where he spends his days that he’s really gotten to know, and you get a sense of that intimacy. I’m looking at the avenue of trees, the way that the light is playing off those trees. Just to the right, you can see these little touches of white where the sun is hitting the trunks directly, but just above that, the trunks are in shadow, a shadow that is cast by the foliage of the tree itself. Above that, you have the further row of trees and again shadow and light, and there’s this loving attention to the way in which these forms exist in space and in this lovely evening light.

0:01:58.2 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: At the same time, it’s not hyper-detailed. You don’t read the specific leaves or foliage on the tree. Instead, he’s trying to capture what he feels or what he senses through light and form and shadow. He’s very different from the early world building in a Flemish sense of Patinir, but it’s also different from the Romantic feel or proto-Romantic feel of Ruisdael, and you can also get a sense in the history of art of why Constable and other British landscape painters gravitated to Rubens.

0:02:26.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: But this painting is also rooted in an earlier tradition of landscape. It’s hard to look at this and not think about the work of Bruegel, for example, especially given our high vantage point.

0:02:36.9 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: Rubens was always thinking and seeing the world through art historical past. At the same time, recent research has shown where his vantage point was from the tower of Het Steen, the manor that was situated on this property, and that explains this high vantage point. It does have that sense of immediacy, quickly capturing what he saw and what he wanted to express.

0:03:00.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And you get the sense that he’s painting this for himself. This is not a painting for purchase. This is something that he wants to keep, that he wants to record, that he wants to explore, and in that sense, it is a very personal image, and we get to see with his eyes. He’s not trying to please anybody but himself.

0:03:17.7 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: These landscapes that he created in the last five years of his life when he had retired to Het Steen were not on commission, unlike the vast majority of works over his career. So we do think that he was creating this out of a personal impulse and indeed for himself. That avenue of oak trees still exists, and you do get a sense of going back in time. And there was a reason why Rubens wanted this manor in particular. It was very centrally located between Antwerp, Brussels, and Mechelen.

0:03:46.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And I can imagine how attractive the property itself was. It had a manor house that had a roof line that was very much in the Flemish tradition. It had this tower. It had a moat, a lake. It’s really just a beautiful property.

0:03:57.9 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: The other thing that really made this appealing was that it came with a title, Lord of Het Steen. So part of the acquisition of this property was also part of Rubens’s project to try and elevate his own social position.

0:04:10.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: Rubens had left Antwerp. He had left that commercial bustle. He was seeking a kind of refuge, and there is a parallel, I think, between the way that we in the modern world now think about the countryside and the way that Rubens was as well.

0:04:23.6 Dr. Christopher D.M. Atkins: It’s quite easy to imagine that you wanted an escape from that, particularly the end of a long, productive life that maybe you wanted a little bit more quiet. And so heading out into the countryside would have appealed to Rubens, I think.

0:04:35.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: In that way, Rubens is expressing on paper the fruits of all of his labor. In a sense, this is the treat at the end of his life that he was able to give himself.

[music]

This work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Peter Paul Rubens: Prince of Painters and Painter of Princes on ArtUK

Lucy Davis, Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2020).

Corina Kleinert, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and His Landscapes: Ideas on Nature and Art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

Lisa Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

Baroque art, an introduction

Read a Reframing Art History textbook chapter, Secular matters of the global baroque