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Artist

Peter Paul Rubens

Year
Siegen 1577 - 1640 Antwerp
Price range
250,000 – 3,000,000 USD +
Peter Paul Rubens was the most distinguished and versatile artist of the Flemish Baroque whose spirited allegorical cycles and sumptuous altarpieces were highly coveted by Europe’s most powerful ruling families of the seventeenth century.

Admired for his brilliant colors, sensual forms, luxuriant, painterly brushstrokes woven into elaborate compositions, Rubens invented an idiom that combined the classical grandeur of the Italian High Renaissance, observed first-hand during an extended stay in Italy, with the naturalistic tendencies of the North.

Rubens championed the concept of ‘ut pictura poesis’ and had an unrivaled power to transform classical art and literature into vivid imagery and theatrical drama, drawing on his personal erudition and interest in Antiquity, which he collected and sketched from life. As court painter to the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, Rubens became the standard-bearer of a spiritual renewal for the State and its interconnected courts. His ascendence to international stardom was connected to the diplomatic missions he undertook to France and England. Rubens also became the trending status symbol painter among Antwerp’s higher bourgeois and burgher echelons. He ran a thriving workshop in Antwerp that involved the foremost talents of his time, notably Van Dyck and Jordaens, and collaborated with other leading specialists such as Jan Breughel and Frans Snyders to broaden his reach. Rubens’ artistic offspring in the centuries to follow consist of the old and modern masters of the highest caliber — WatteauBoucherGainsborough, Delacroix, Böcklin, Renoir, Picasso, de Kooning and Freud to name a few — all of whom contributed to his enduring influence in the story of art.

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Selected Artworks
Market

Top 3 auction prices

26,926,005 $
2023
58,002,712 $
2016
76,529,056 $
2002

Details

The details are: Sotheby’s New York – 26 Jan 2023 lot 5, Christie’s London – 7 Jul 2016 lot 12 (44,882,500 GBP), and Sotheby’s London – 10 Jul 2002 lot 6 (49,506,648 GBP).
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Books on Peter Paul Rubens

Friso Lammertse and Alejandro Vergara, Rubens: Painter of Sketches, exh. cat., Madrid and Rotterdam, 2018.

Gelinde Gruber, Sabine Haag, Stefan Weppelmann and Jochen Sander eds., Rubens: The Power of Transformation, exh. cat., Munich, 2017.

Tim J. Barringer, Rubens and His Legacy, exh. cat, London, 2014.

Peter C. Sutton, The Age of Rubens, exh. cat., New York, 1993.

Peter C. Sutton, Marjorie E. Wieseman and Nico van Hout, eds., Drawn by the Brush, Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, exh. cat., New Haven, 2004.

Cornelis de Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet vande Edel Vry Schilder-Const, 1662, reprint, Antwerp, 1971.

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