[Illustration: PLATE II.--CHRIST À LA PAILLE (At Antwerp Museum)
Whatever the Biblical story Rubens chose, he handled it not only with skill, but with a certain sense of conviction that is the more remarkable in one who owed no allegiance to the Church. There is fine feeling and deep reverence in the "Christ à la Paille," in addition to the dramatic feeling that accompanied all his religious pictures. The colouring, though very bold, is most effective; in the hands of a less skilled painter such a display of primary colouring might well have seemed violent or even vulgar.]
Consider the vast range of achievements that embraced landscape, portraiture, and decorative work, giving to every subject such quality of workmanship and skill in composition, as none save a very few of the world's great masters have been able to convey to canvas. And let it be remembered, too, that Rubens was not only a painter, he was a statesman and a diplomat; and amid cares and anxieties that might well have filled the life of any smaller man, he found time to paint countless pictures in every style, and to move steadily forward along the road to mastery, so that his second period is better than the first, in which he was, if the expression may be used with propriety, finding himself. The third period, which saw the painting of the great works that hang in Antwerp's Cathedral and Museum to-day, and is represented in our own National Gallery and Wallace Collection, was the best of all. Passing from his labours as he did at a comparatively early age, for Rubens was but sixty-three when he died, he did not suffer the slow decline of powers that has so often accompanied men who reached their greatest achievements in ripe middle age and shrink to mere shadows of a name. He did not reach his supreme mastery of colour until he had lived for half a century or more, and the pictures that have the greatest blots upon them from the point of view of the twentieth century, were painted before he reached the summit of his powers. It is perhaps unfortunate that Rubens painted far too many works to admit of a truly representative collection in any city or gallery. The best are widely scattered; some are in the Prado in Madrid, others are in Belgium, some are in Florence. Holland has a goodly collection, while Antwerp boasts among many masterpieces "The Passing of Christ," "The Adoration of the Magi," "The Prodigal Son," and "The Christ à la Paille." Munich, Brussels, Dresden, Vienna, and other cities have famous examples of both ripe and early art that must be seen before the master can be judged fairly and without prejudice. It is impossible to found an opinion not likely to be shaken, upon the work to be seen in London or in Paris, where the Louvre holds many of the painter's least attractive works. It may be said that Peter Paul Rubens is represented in every gallery of importance throughout Europe, that the number of his acknowledged works runs into four figures, and that there are very few without some definite and attractive aspect of treatment and composition that goes far to atone for the occasional shortcomings of taste. For his generation Rubens sufficed amply. He was a man of so many gifts that he would have made his mark had he never set brush to a canvas, although time has blotted out the recollection of his diplomatic achievements or relegated them to obscure chronicles and manuscripts that are seldom disturbed save by scholars. To nine out of ten he is known only as a painter, and his fame rests upon the work that chances to have given his critics their first view and most lasting impression of his varied achievements. It may be said that among those who care least for Rubens, and are quite satisfied to condemn him for the coarseness with which he treated certain subjects, there are many who are prompt to declare that in matters of art the treatment is of the first importance and the subject is but secondary. However, Rubens is hardly in need of an apologist. His best work makes him famous in any company, and there is so much of it that the rest may be disregarded. Moreover, we must not forget that the types he portrayed from time to time with such amazing frankness really existed all round him. He took them as he found them, just as the earlier painters of the Renaissance took their Madonnas from the peasant girls they found working in the fields, or travelling to the cities on saint days and at times of high festival. Many a Renaissance Madonna enshrined on canvas for the adoration of the devout could remove the least suspicion of sanctity from herself, if she did but raise her downcast eyes or smile, as doubtless she smiled in the studio wherein she was immortalised.