Cadmus, Guided by Minerva, Observes the Spartoi Fighting

Southern Netherlands, before 1747

Object data

oil on paper laid down on panel

support: height 26.2 cm × width 42.3 cm

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 December 2006
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 13 September 2007

Provenance

…; collection of the Earls of Kingston, Kilronan Castle, near Carrick-on-Shannon, County Roscommon, Ireland;¹…; Sackville Gallery, London, 1930 (as on panel, 22 x 42 cm);…;² with the dealer Jacques Goudstikker, Amsterdam, 1933;³ from whom bought by Franz Koenigs (1881-1941), Haarlem;⁴ from whom on loan to the Boymans Museum, Rotterdam, 1935-40; redeemed by the Lisser & Rosenkranz Bank, Amsterdam, 2 April 1940; removed from the museum by Goudstikker, 19 April 1940, and sold, fl. 17,000 (but paid fl. 14,500), to Isaäc de Bruijn (1872-1953), May 1940;⁵ donated by Isaäc de Bruijn and his wife, Johanna Geertruida de Bruijn-Van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Muri bei Bern, 1949, but kept in usufruct;⁶ transferred to the museum, 1961; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1999-2011

Object number: SK-A-4051

Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland

The artist

Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577 - Antwerp 1640)

Peter Paul Rubens was born on the eve of the feast day of the saints Peter and Paul (after whom he was named) – on 28 June 1577 – in Siegen, Westphalia, the son of a Protestant lawyer Jan (1530-1588), who with his wife Maria (1538-1608) had left their native Antwerp in 1568. He died a long professed Catholic in Antwerp on 30 May 1640 after an immensely successful career as a painter, from which he amassed a fortune, and as a public servant in the service of the Archduchess Isabella, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and of his sovereign, her nephew, King Philip IV of Spain.

His oeuvre includes well over a thousand paintings – partly made possible by a well-organized studio – supplemented by an extensive group of drawings and of engravings after his work, the production of which he supervised. Much of his output was of religious subjects, but he also specialized in mythologies; he was an innovative landscape painter and a sympathetic portraitist especially of friends and members of his family. Four elaborate tapestry series were designed by him, and he occasionally followed the then current Antwerp practice of collaborating with other independent artists.

Rubens’s protean genius encompassed other fields: he was well versed in classical literature (like other educated men of his time) and in archaeology; he published a book on contemporary Genoese architecture and contributed to architectural design in Antwerp. An avid collector (and successful dealer) of paintings, classical sculpture, gems, and drawings by other masters, he was an expert iconographer, and a regular contributor of designs for frontispieces. Recent research has shown he was an active investor in property and a generous financier.

Three artists are later recorded as his teachers in Antwerp, where his widowed, and now Catholic mother had returned, of which the last, the learned Otto van Veen (1556-1629) was the most influential. In May 1600, two years after he had become a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke, he went to Italy, from where he returned at the end of 1608. There he had been employed as court painter to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua (1562-1612), for whom he acted as a diplomatic courier to King Philip III of Spain (1578-1621) in 1603. Beside his study of classical and Italian art, he executed large-scale altarpieces in Rome, Mantua and Genoa.

The archducal sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands appointed him their court painter in 1609; the following year he married Isabella Brant (1591-1626) with whom he had three children. His reputation and clientele became international; after completing the decoration (destroyed) of the aisles and galleries of the Antwerp Jesuit Church, he was commissioned by Marie de Médicis, Queen Mother of France, to paint a cycle of her life (Musée du Louvre) and that of her deceased husband (never completed) for her Luxembourg Palace in Paris. In the 1630s he painted a cycle for the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in London (in situ) for King Charles I of Great Britain; for the city of Antwerp, he designed the decorations for the Cardinal-Infante’s Joyous Entry into Antwerp and for King Philip IV of Spain, an extensive series (chiefly Museo Nacional del Prado) for the Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. He was ennobled by Philip IV in 1624 and knighted by Charles I in 1630.

Rubens’s public service (conducted in secret early on) for the archduchess began in the early 1620s and became increasingly important. Following a visit to Madrid, he was engaged in high-level diplomatic negotiations in London in 1629-30. Having attended the exiled Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis in the southern Netherlands he largely retired from such service in 1632, two years after his second marriage to Helena Fourment, with whom he had five children.

REFERENCES
C. Ruelens and M. Rooses (eds.), Correspondance de Rubens et documents epistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, 6 vols., Antwerp 1887-1909; M. Rooses, L’oeuvre de P.P. Rubens. Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, 5 vols., Antwerp 1886-92; R.S. Magurn, The Letters of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge 1955; Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard in 29 parts and multiple volumes of which the last are forthcoming, 1968-; M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo Completo, Milan 1989; J.S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols., Princeton 1980

Entry

The story of how the hero Cadmus was advised by the goddess Minerva to sow the teeth of the dragon he had killed, from which sprang soldiers known as the Spartoi – the five survivors of whose internecine strife then assisted him in founding the city of Thebes – is told by Ovid (Metamorphoses III: 101-110).

The composition in the Rijksmuseum sketch was devised for one of the pictures in the series commissioned from Rubens in 1636 by King Philip IV of Spain to decorate the royal hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada, outside Madrid.⁷ For this commission Rubens formulated the modelli, but obtained other artists to execute the majority of the larger canvases. In the case of the Cadmus composition, this task was performed by Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678); his painting is in the Museo del Prado (inv. no. Poo1713).

Rubens’s original modello passed by inheritance after 1889 to the Bacon family, Norfolk.⁸ The Amsterdam sketch was thought probably to have come from this collection when it was exhibited in Amsterdam in 1933, and it was acquired as autograph by Franz Koenigs. When Isaac de Bruijn acquired it just before or soon after the Nazi’s occupation of Holland, he was very unlikely to have been aware of the sketch’s rejection in Van Puyvelde’s survey of oil sketches by Rubens which was published in Basle in 1940.⁹

Van Puyvelde’s view has not subsequently been convincingly challenged; the level of execution of the Rijksmuseum sketch is poor and no other modello by Rubens for the Torre de la Parada commission was executed on paper. However, Cleveringa believed that it was probably preparatory for the picture destined for the Torre de la Parada and that it was executed in Rubens’s studio.¹⁰ This ascription was followed in the 1976 catalogue. But even if it was executed in the studio – and the handling seems too distant from that of Rubens to make it likely – it is impossible to believe that it would have been preferred as a modello to Rubens’s original, when as was the case, Jordaens worked up the canvas.

The copy was not necessarily made in Rubens’s lifetime. It is not known when the paper support was glued to the panel, but the latter has been estimated by Klein as only ready for use from 1654 (of course it cannot be known if its still current role was that originally intended). Many of Rubens’s modelli for the commission were early in Spain,¹¹ but others remained in the Netherlands. The prototype for the present copy was in the collection of Ignatius de Roore (1686-1747) and was offered in his posthumous sale of 1747, as was The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, which served as a prototype for an etching made most probably after Rubens’s death.¹² Granted De Roore’s reputation as a pasticheur (for which see under SK-A-398), it is tempting to suggest that he may have been responsible for the copy after Rubens’s Cadmus sketch which he owned. The copy is more or less identical in size with the original, and would have been made before the latter was laterally extended.¹³

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

J.S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols., Princeton 1980, nos. 174, 175, 188, 204, 205, under no. 176

Collection catalogues

1976, p. 484, no. A 4051 (with incorrect references to articles by M. Jaffé and H. Vlieghe).

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'after Peter Paul Rubens, Cadmus, Guided by Minerva, Observes the Spartoi Fighting, before 1747', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5320

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