As an exhibition, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector provided the unique experience of showing a substantial portion of Rubens’s personal art collection within his own house. When I visited the exhibition for the first time, a pail and mop lay inadvertently forgotten in a corner, further adding to the domestic atmosphere. Rarely is an exhibition as perfectly suited to its setting, and for this apt pairing the curators Kristin Belkin and Fiona Healy deserve to be congratulated. The catalogue cannot duplicate the in situ experience, but it provides the important alternative perspective of tracking the transformation of the collection over time.

The main essay by Jeffrey Muller almost equals in length the one in his book Rubens: The Artist as Collector (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Muller emphasizes how the princely collection served Rubens’s scholarly, financial, and political interests even while it stimulated his creativity and demonstrated his own leading place in art history. Although necessary overlaps link Muller’s two texts, this excellent new essay complements rather than restates the arguments in the book. In A House of Art Muller tracks the striking differences between how the collection looked to visitors who saw it before and after 1626. That year, prompted by both political and economic considerations, the artist sold a substantial portion of his antiquities and paintings to the Duke of Buckingham, which created the need as well as opportunity for numerous new acquisitions. Whereas early visitors remembered the presence of antiquities and history paintings, when Edward Norgate revisited the house in 1640, he was struck by the numerous landscape paintings. The transformed collection also gave greater prominence to pastoral and rustic scenes as well as to the art of Titian. Rubens somehow found time during his diplomatic mission to Spain in 1628 to make for himself full-scale copies of the paintings by Titian in the royal collection. He also retained a large portion of the landscapes and mythologies he painted after marrying a beautiful teenager and purchasing a country house, Het Steen, where they spent half of each year.

In recreating the display of the collection and other art-related functions of the original spaces, Muller observes that Rubens designed the grand new wing of the Antwerp house to include two painting studios (one for his own use, the other for assistants) as well as two studies. In the larger, more accessible one, the cantoor, he stored copies after classical sculpture, prints, casts, and other materials useful for art production (e.g., cat. nos. 79–84), but in the smaller studiolo secreto with its highly restricted access he kept such prized items as his classical gems (cat. nos. 66–77).

Did Rubens also occasionally plan his artworks in this secluded studiolo rather than in the studio in which he actually painted them? Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, editors of Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), plausibly suggest that a few artists in Renaissance Italy began to separate their professional activity in this way, making their preparatory designs in the studiolo and then executing the paintings or sculptures in the workshop. Significantly, this practice associated the more conceptual aspect of art making with the humanist-type studiolo rather than the traditional workshop.

Rubens owned roughly one thousand works, according to the estimations of Belkin and Healy. Although the catalogue includes only a limited sampling of the celebrated large paintings by his own hand, the range of exhibited examples testifies to the diversity of his art holdings and recognizes areas that tend to be neglected. Of foremost importance in this respect are the ancient cameos Rubens delighted in studying at quiet moments, and he probably owned each of the twelve exhibited examples. His collection also included several seventeenth-century Dutch tonal paintings, including a seascape by Jan Porcellis as well as five still lifes by Willem Claesz Heda and the less known Jan Jansz den Uyl, which he perhaps acquired for their subtle observations of reflected light. The unexpected presence of these Dutch paintings in his house tends to be forgotten, largely because the descriptions in the Specification (the posthumous list of works destined for auction) do not permit the specific examples to be identified. In this and several other instances, the curators usefully decided to exhibit works representative of what Rubens owned, as they explicitly state: “This work is intended to convey the impression of the type of painting by [name of artist] that fits the description given in the Specification without claiming to be that work” (e.g., 218, 221, 234).

Many variables determine which works get included, and I personally would have wanted to add an istoria painting by Simon de Vos in order to see it in the context of Rubens’s collection. Available examples by the younger artist contradict the contemporary report that he “had become so commendable in designing histories and pieces of invention” that Rubens wished to acquire some of his pieces (letter of Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, February 2, 1629; quoted in Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector (1989), 13) and actually owned at least the Prodigal Son listed in the Specification. Simon de Vos has another curious pictorial link to Rubens. He (rather than Frans Francken II or Cornelis de Vos) must have painted at least the figural sections in the so-called Salon of Rubens (Stockholm, National Museum), which shows a room with three paintings, all by Rubens.

The catalogue entries are grouped by medium into four sections, each preceded by an informative introduction. Using a range of evidence, including the final distribution in 1645 of profits from the sales, the curators distinguish (where possible) between pieces acquired or painted before 1626, when Rubens’s first wife Isabella Brant died, and those that entered the collection subsequently. “Paintings and Sculptures” constitute the largest group of entries by far, and their organization follows the posthumously compiled Specification, written with auction buyers in mind. Italian old master originals and Rubens’s copies are followed by his original works, then paintings and sculptures by Northern old masters and contemporaries. Gregory Martin contributed half-a-dozen entries to “Paintings and Sculptures,” and Kristin Belkin and Fiona Healy wrote the rest, as they did the entries in the other three shorter sections. “Rubens as Collector of Antiquities” deals with his classical sculptures and gems; “Drawings after the Antique and the Rubens Cantoor” considers materials used also for reference in the studio; and “Rubens as Collector of Drawings” offers examples by Northern and Italian artists, which Rubens sometimes retouched. An unduly rarified image of the artist’s relationship to his collection is prevented in Muller’s essay through evidence of Rubens’s skillful dealing in art. The curators add the evidence of provenance and other data, including his unexpected attentiveness to the Far Eastern market (292).

Engagingly written and sometimes lengthy, the comprehensively researched entries contain a wealth of varied material. For that reason selecting a couple of examples proved difficult, but here are two closely related ones. The entry for Portrait of Nicolaes-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, attributed to Louis Finson (cat. no. 59), discusses the nature of the correspondence between the French scholar and the erudite artist as well as the inclusion of Rubens’s self-portrait in Peiresc’s collection of contemporary scholars’ portraits, Rubens’s own surprising preference for portraits of sixteenth-century scholars, and his personal versions of humanist friendship portraits. The entry for Tryphon’s cameo Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (cat. no. 66) discusses when this cameo entered and left Rubens’s collection, the sharing with Peiresc of a plaster cast of this and fifty-five other cameos, Tryphon’s witty interpretation of the narrative by Apuleius, and Rubens’s special fondness for portrait gems. Almost two hundred comparative illustrations add to the usefulness of the entries.

The exhibition’s theme and the high scholarly level of the catalogue are both appropriate for this cultivated artist. While Rubens lived there, the Rubenshuis became not only a house of art but also a place of intellectual engagement.

Even to those familiar with the artist’s oeuvre, Rubens: A Master in the Making at the National Gallery in London stood apart from previous exhibitions for the degree of intense physical energy conveyed by the chosen works. Especially in the presence of large paintings, such as the recently discovered Massacre of the Innocents (cat. no. 82, private collection, on loan to the National Gallery, London), the experience of active physicality proved almost overwhelming. In the absence of the direct perception of size available in the exhibition, the catalogue uses many excellent color details to evoke part of the effect of the originals.

The title clearly conveys the exhibition’s emphasis on quality. The term “master” is used to designate exceptional artistic ability rather than the completion of apprenticeship with the right to have one’s own pupils, the original meaning of becoming a “master.” Quality cannot be proved, but the selection and juxtaposition of works encourages qualitative distinctions of the type made in the catalogue (e.g., cat. no. 8, where the author describes improvements in the depiction of expression and foreshortening). Comparisons between works with the same motif or subject that Rubens produced at different times during his early career serve as an effective gauge of the artist’s rapidly escalating mastery. For instance, there are many examples of his repeated quotations and variations of favored poses, human as well as equine.

No reference exists in the title to another major aspect of the exhibition: its geographical priorities. The distinct focus on Italy reflects the abiding interest of David Jaffé, the museum’s senior curator, and continues the direction of a 1992 exhibition he curated at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, entitled Rubens and the Italian Renaissance. Although the show in London restricts its chronological range to works produced between 1598 and 1614, it likewise concentrates on the formative influence of the Italian old masters and the classical sculptures the artist saw during the eight years he lived in Italy. In the catalogue his copies, quotations, and paraphrases of classical sculptures are accompanied by reproductions of the sculptures. The exhibition had no such photographic comparisons but cast a spotlight on the recurrent references to the classical crouching Venus by placing a roughly life-sized Roman marble sculpture (fig. 61 in the catalogue) in the center of a gallery. In contrast with the exhibition in Canberra, the one in London did not exhibit any Italian paintings for comparison, and the catalogue reproduces less than a handful of examples, which makes the frequent references to individual Italian artists unevenly accessible to readers.

No exhibition can do everything, and surveying the classical and Italian influences is a topic worthy of a large exhibition. The problem in the catalogue is that Northern works are neither absent from the discussion nor adequately covered. Yet as far as I noticed, nowhere is the reader alerted that Northern influences are not part of its scope. This results in the misleading impression that even though Rubens also copied works by Hans Holbein (fig. 19), Barthel Beham, Hendrik Goltzius, Adam Elsheimer, and other Northerners, as noted in the catalogue, they played an insignificant role in his development into a “master.” Keeping a rough count, I found one or more references to individual Northern artists scattered on about twenty-five of the two hundred pages. All are short or made in passing, with the exception of two catalogue entries, one for a copy after Beham’s Battle of Nude Men (cat. no. 6), the other for all thirteen of the drawings after an Italianate écorché sculpture that Ulrich Heine attributes to the Netherlandish Mannerist Willem van Tetrode (cat. nos. 33–44). According to Heine, Rubens probably owned a version of this anatomical model, equipped with movable joints and interchangeable limbs. As exemplified by the number of copies prominently featured in the exhibition, he studied the exaggerated Michelangelesque musculature of its flayed body from every angle.

A somewhat lopsided view of Rubens’s exceptional achievement results from presenting his exposure to classical and Italian precedents as the crucial influence for his development into a “master.” No previous artist so successfully combined Italian and Northern traditions in his own distinctive style. For instance, as is evident in the magnificent Samson and Delilah that Rubens painted about 1610 to hang over the main fireplace in Nicolaas Rockox’s house (cat. no 77), he absorbed not only influences from classical sculpture and Italian Renaissance artists, as the catalogue entry duly observes, but also from the nocturnal Judith by Adam Elsheimer, a German whom Rubens esteemed (he owned four Elsheimer paintings).

Three essays precede the entries. The first, a biographical overview by Jaffé and Minna Moore Ede, proceeds chronologically. Toward the end the authors discuss a monumental work, The Raising of the Cross, painted in 1609–10 just after the return to Antwerp (fig. 7). Within its traditional Netherlandish triptych format, Rubens successfully brought together Venetian and Central Italian influences, thereby achieving in his own style the merger Giorgio Vasari regretted did not exist in the works of Titian. Instead of ending with this acknowledged masterpiece, the first essay closes with a later triptych, finished in 1614, the restrained Descent from the Cross, which is painted with a smoother, more traditionally Northern brush technique. Because this essay shares the title of the whole exhibition, “Rubens: A Master in the Making,” one expects it to end when “the making” is realized. No explanation is given for the cut-off date of 1614, which may confusingly suggest that Rubens achieved his full measure as an artist after the fury of movement highlighted in the exhibition had subsided.

The second essay, “Rubens’s ‘Pocket Book’: An Introduction to the Creative Process,” by Jaffé assisted by Amanda Bradley, highlights how much valuable information about Rubens’s creative thinking was lost when virtually all of his “quite fat notebook” with about five hundred pages perished in a fire in the early eighteenth century. In addition to a summary of the notebook’s history, this essay usefully evaluates the second-hand evidence found in sketchbooks kept by other artists who copied parts of Rubens’s notebook. The authors mention that the images were grouped thematically and give the example of trahantes (those being dragged) but make no organized attempt to reconstruct Rubens’s categories. More is said about the nature of the groupings on page 88 (“women bathing, massacres, figures being dragged, etc.”) and in the next essay.

In this essay, “Words and Thoughts in Rubens’s Early Drawings,” Elizabeth McGrath of the Warburg Institute focuses on the inscriptions Rubens wrote for his own benefit directly on his drawings. According to McGrath, whether he used Latin or Italian helps to establish dating. The “self-addressed instructions” advise corrections and revisions, note iconographical afterthoughts, and even, she persuasively argues, record ideas to develop in new works instead of referring to the image they accompany. The essay ends with an erudite yet poignant interpretation of the process by which Rubens adapted a quotation from a speech by Cicero to a drawing of Venus bending to catch the last breath of the dying Adonis. Like Rubens, McGrath has “sensitivity to texts as well as images,” and for her as for Rubens classical texts serve as stimuli, not constraints, on creativity.

Several art historians participated in writing the catalogue entries: Jaffé with Minna Moore Ede, Ulrich Heinen, and Veronika Kopecky, with contributions from Delfina Bergameschi. The ninety-one works are grouped into six sections that generally proceed chronologically, following Rubens from Antwerp to Italy and then back to Antwerp.

The first group of entries, entitled “Early Ambitions as a Battle Painter,” vividly conveys the grandness of Rubens’s aspirations while he was still in his early twenties. Having barely finished apprenticeship and still a resident of Antwerp, he strove to distinguish his own istoria paintings from the stolid production of his last and most influential teacher, Otto van Veen. (Inclusion of a painting by Van Veen would have illustrated the mixed degree to which he succeeded at that time in distancing himself from his mentor’s example.) His ambition is best exemplified in a preference for subjects of violent action involving humans and horses, such as the rarely represented battle of the Amazons. The exhibition includes an example from about 1598, painted in Antwerp, and another recently discovered example from about 1603–5, when he lived in Italy. If exhibitions could be renewed to include the discoveries and insights they provoke, then the renewed exhibition might include yet another version of the battle of the Amazons that, judging from a photograph, seems to deserve an attribution to Rubens. This third example, which may date even earlier than the exhibited versions, is in a private collection in England.

The remaining six sections of catalogue entries generally follow a chronological sequence but with a varying focus. The second and sixth groups contain paintings produced in Italy and then back in the southern Netherlands, the fourth includes religious paintings made in both countries (this section could have been eliminated and the works redistributed), and groups three and five emphasize less and more creative stages in his working process. “The Reworking of Rome” concentrates on the copies Rubens made in Italy after classical and Italian works, and the complex penultimate section, “Sequences: Building a Composition,” evokes how he built creatively on his own previous achievements. This group of entries stands out as particularly effective because the main argument is also carried visually. Juxtapositions of drawings, oil sketches, and paintings with comparable motifs and subjects enable viewers to track the “process of designing a composition in sequences,” as Rubens responded to his own earlier production, explored alternative solutions, and generated pictorial ideas to consider in subsequent works. As this section exemplifies, a recurrent strength of Rubens: A Master in the Making is its attention to the visual data, which exhibitions nowadays often neglect.