Rubens & Women – Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

A modest exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Rubens & Women aims to reassess the idea that Rubens painted only ‘Rubenesque’ beauties.

Rubens & Women

The Salterton Arts Review is currently in a flurry of post-festive art enjoyment, fitting in exhibitions it wasn’t possible to see when they first opened in 2023. This means that if you, too, wish to see them, you had better be quick! Rubens & Women is one such exhibition, having opened back in September. But better late than never when it comes to seeing an excellent grouping of works from private and public collections.

You may know Sir Peter Paul Rubens mainly for his association with ‘Rubenesque’ beauties: fleshy, curvaceous nudes. A poster boy for body positivity and realistic expectations about the female form! The truth the Dulwich Picture Gallery would bring to our attention is that Rubens’ paintings of women are far more varied and complex than this reductionist position would have us believe. Holders themselves of a sizeable number of examples, they have therefore assembled this exhibition to prove it.

The exhibition opens with a painting of a man: the artist’s self portrait. Peter Paul Rubens was born in Siegen – now in Germany but then in the Holy Roman Empire. His parents were refugees from Antwerp, and the family returned there when he was about 12. Antwerp was then in the Spanish Netherlands, and Rubens later enjoyed the patronage of Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, and Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain as court painter, as well as acting as a diplomat on behalf of the latter. He was perhaps the key painter of the Flemish Baroque, embodying the humanising religious painting of the Counter Reformation as well as taking on classical themes and contemporary portraits. Having been knighted in both Spain and England, he died aged 62 in 1640.

Portraits, Religious Themes, Learning from the Past, Monumental Goddesses

The long exhibition space at the Dulwich Picture Gallery lends itself quite nicely to a sequence of thematic or chronological groupings of works. Curators Ben van Beneden and Amy Orrock have gone for the former. The exhibition opens with a selection of portraits. Some are women Rubens loved: his first wife, his daughter. Some are patrons, some depict unidentified sitters. But the room achieves its aim. As we enter the exhibition we are surrounded by images which defy that idea of Rubens as the painter of naked, fleshy curves. These paintings show his skill as an artist, his ability to capture personality, texture and life on canvas.

We start to see some of those naked forms in the next two rooms, but our assumptions of Rubens are already subverted at this point. We see first works of a religious nature, studies and sketches more than the finished products. Even when the male form (eg. the body of Christ) is present, the women are the focus. They range in size from small works on paper to a large painting of Adam and Eve. This last is rather un-Rubenesque, both in style and in the handling of the naked forms. It dates to before Rubens went to Italy and learned from classical and Renaissance examples.

Speaking of this artistic education, it’s the subject of the next room (after a brief pause in the gallery’s mausoleum to see the Crouching Venus from the Royal Collection. It’s a work Rubens would have seen in Mantua, and very similar to a pose he seems to have drawn from life in defiance of the assumption that artists didn’t use nude female models in Rubens’ day. Elsewhere we see him copy from Michelangelo’s muscled female forms. The inference is that if Rubens’ nudes were solid and fleshy, they were not the only ones.

Moving into the final room, these threads come together. Rubens’ younger second wife Helena Fourment appears in various classical guises. These larger canvases feature classical stories retold, the naked flesh adding monumentality to the goddesses depicted. Having veered away from these classic Rubenesque women, we return to them with a new appreciation for their place in the artist’s oeuvre.

An Exhibition About Women, Through the Male Gaze

In terms of challenging assumptions about Sir Peter Paul Rubens, I thought Rubens & Women excellent. Where I was hoping it would go further than it did was in its incorporation of women into the narrative. This likely was wishful thinking: this is an exhibition about a male artist. But I had hoped to see more about Rubens’ relationships with some of these women. How did he feel about his wives? Or about those Renaissance women he copied? He was a prolific letter writer, so I would hope something insightful still existed. Or, since he had important female patrons, what did they think about him?

This opinion comes with a lot of caveats. I haven’t read the exhibition catalogue, which is sometimes where interesting analyses of just such topics come to light. And I don’t know what sort of information is out there which would have answered this perceived gap. But I think back to exhibitions like Dürer’s Journeys at the National Gallery: how interesting the archival sources were and how much light they shed on the artist’s character. Without anything similar here I came away with a better understanding of the breadth of Rubens’ paintings, but the artist himself remains elusive.

I recognise that these are the ponderings of an armchair critic. The curators brought together an exceptional range of works for my viewing pleasure, some from private collections or never before exhibited in the UK. For that I am grateful. I may just have to wait a little longer for an exhibition that allows me to understand who Rubens was, as well as what he painted. Or which brings those women to life, for that matter.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

Rubens & Women on until 28 January 2024