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Rubens, his life and his house

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Hoogstraat and Grote Pieter Potstraat

Printers museum Plantin-Moretus

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Strolling to the Carolus Borromeus church

Rockoxhuis- Rubens tomb at St.Jacobskerk

Cogels-Osylei area, unique in the world (1)

Cogels Osy area, unique in the world (2)

Born in Siegen near Koln, Germany, on the 28th of June 1577, where his Flemish family had found refuge. He returned to Antwerp only when ha was 12 years old. His precocious attraction to art and antiquity will soon orientate his destiny. Like many other artists, he learned a lot from his sojourn in Italy. This influence will stay the rest of his life, inspiring his work, even the architecture of his home. Rubens will live his best years during the reign of the infant Isabella. His school gains international reputation. Flanders being a sort of Spanish colony at the time the archduke Albert appoints him to be the Courts painter in Brussels in 1609. From 1622 on, Rubens travels all over Europe as ambassador, representing Flanders in a splendid way. He dies in Antwerp in 1640 and is buried in the Saint-Jacobs church.
The house he built in 1610 will be the one he will live the rest of his life. Designed after his own plans, influenced by the Italian Renaissance style, beautiful and practical, perfectly disposed, as well as for the pleasure of the eyes and life as for the functional necessities of his work, he will conceive and execute here most of his master works. A rough estimation is that he produced 2500 works during his life. Obviously the painters pupil union didn’t exist at that time to temper the zeal of the master! ;-) Work had to be done with a strict discipline and organization. The project was almost more important than the final product because it emanated from the artist himself, while a part of the work was done by his pupils. A few famous ones were Anthony Van Dijck, Jacob Jordaens, the Velvet Brueghel….
If the facades on the street side are quite sober, the monumental baroque exuberance explodes in the inner courtyard. Obviously, Rubens took his inspiration in Italy for his garden and decorations. Not only did he decorate the area with niches, frontons, not only did he enhance the interior facades with garlands, he edified two different building face to face, connected by a genuine “ triumph arch”, sort of magisterial synthesis of the Flemish and Italian character of the house.
The perspective on the garden and the garden pavilion completes the décor. The Rubens house is considered as one of the masterpieces of Flemish baroque, just like the admirable “Grand Place” in Brussels or the beautiful Saint-Charles Borromeus church in Antwerp.

Rubens house garden

If the part of the wing where he lived is the traditional reflection of the Flemish patrician house, vast and comfortable, disposed with taste and enhanced with master pieces, it’s above all his personal museum and work ateliers, that arouse, even during his lifetime, “ astonishment from strangers and admiration from visitors”. An inventory, made just after he died, revealed nearly 300 works he owned and from the greatest painters: Jan van Eyck, Hugo van der Goes, Quinten Metsys, Brueghel the Elder, Tiziano, Veronese, Raphael….without counting a lot of his friends and pupils (only from Adriaan Brouwer he had 17 paintings!!). You can see a few today in his art cabinet that ends in a “hemicycle museum where he kept an important collection of antiquities he brought from Italy. It defies imagination!: sculptures, sketches, tapestries, books, gravures, medals, ivory objects, precious stones….
In the rooms on the first floor Helena Fourment portrait is exposed here. She gave him five children, to add to the three he had from a previous bed. As the visit goes on, the rooms follow each other, the one more beautiful than the other. Cordoba leather, rare objects...
Don’t leave the house without visiting the Renaissance dining room with the famous self-portrait immortalizing him in all his success. Or the grand atelier where the great man received his guests of honour and where the possible future clients could appreciate from a distance the work of the numerous collaborators brushing large panels planned by a Rubens project. He prepared a sketch adapted to the budget of the client. Then he let the realization to his atelier--or did it himself--and often added his finishing touch giving it a personal cachet. You will see here a beautiful "Annunciation”: dynamic composition, like always, fresh colours, moving expressions.
It’s from that atelier that, during years, genial works, numerous masterpieces, often of an impressive dimension, destined for churches, monasteries, religious convents and palaces and who make today the pride of most of the museums all over the world.

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ANTWERP-Rubens house