Violence is perhaps the characteristic of Rubens' early work. He has the grand manner without the grand method, his contrasts of light and shade and even of colour amuse where they do not offend, and his drawing is by no means remarkable or inspired. At best it is correct. We feel that we cannot see the wood because of the trees, that the blending has not been sufficiently skilful to bring about proportion and harmony, and that the expression of a giant form with prize-fighter's muscles in the foreground of a canvas is sufficient to fill the painter with a delight that enables him happily to ignore the rest. It is the enthusiasm of clever youth, the youth of a man in whose veins there is enough and to spare of very healthy blood, in whose mental equipment refinement has been overlooked.
The death of his mother, the distressful plight of his favourite city, the responsibility of his commissions, his marriage and the fruits of his Italian travel brought about the second period, and started the traditions that give Antwerp a school and a name in the history of European art. The violence passes slowly from the canvases, the straining after effect that is so obvious and often so unpleasing in the earlier pictures goes with it. The chiaroscuro is more subdued and consequently more pleasing, only in the handling of colour the painter is still clumsy and heavy. Rubens, the great colourist, seems to have been born when the artist was more than forty years old.
Some of the best work of the second period is in Antwerp and Brussels, but it is to be found scattered all over Europe, and there are examples in private collections in this country. Perhaps the dominant impression that these works leave is one of certain difficulties created to be overcome. Just as the painter in his first manner revelled in his strength, so in his second period he rejoices in his skill. It was left to the later years to weld strength and skill into the service, on pictures that could stand for both and emphasise neither. Mythology continued to hold him, indeed we must never forget that Rubens lived in the age of pseudo-classicism, and is to be counted among its victims. To his second period belongs such work as the disgusting "Procession of Silenus" now in Munich, a picture in which the grossness of the theme is only rivalled by the vulgarity of the treatment. Some of Rubens' apologists have held that this class of work was painted as a protest against vice, but such apologies are far-fetched. Rubens needs no apologist. Consider his work as a whole, and what is good dwarfs what is bad. Doubtless, had he been able in the later days to re-possess and destroy some of his more tainted pictures, he would have done so. It will be remarked by all who know Rubens' work intimately, that throughout his life he was happier with a Venus than a Madonna, more at home with some great classical figure, than with the picture of Christ. He did not respond to Christianity in the sense that the Venetians responded to it, he could not for all his reputation have painted a Madonna as Bellini did, and there is no reason to believe that he would have cared to do so. Then again we may not forget that Rubens the artist, and Rubens the courtier, and Rubens the special envoy, were closely associated with Rubens the man of business, who would always have painted for choice the work likely to find immediate acceptance. There were times when some legend of Saint or Martyr moved him strangely, and he turned to it with a measure of inspiration not often excelled by the greatest of the Renaissance artists; but these occasions were rare, although Antwerp preserves one of the most effective results of such inspiration in the "Last Communion of St. Francis." It may be remarked in this place that to see Rubens at his best, one must not go to the National Gallery or to the Louvre or to the Prado--Antwerp and Vienna hold some of the finest examples of his second and third manner. And we must never forget that Art is concerned with treatment, and that subject is of secondary interest to artists.