Object data
oil on panel
support: height 33 cm × width 24.5 cm × thickness 1.0 cm
outer size: depth 7.8 cm (support incl. frame)
Peter Paul Rubens (after)
c. 1628
oil on panel
support: height 33 cm × width 24.5 cm × thickness 1.0 cm
outer size: depth 7.8 cm (support incl. frame)
…; collection Johan Willem Friso van Nassau-Dietz (1687-1711), from 1702;1 listed at Het Loo in 1757 (‘no. 51 De ontmoetinge van Jacob en Esau door Rubens 1 v. 2 d. x 10 d. [36.6 x 26.2 cm]’);2 transferred to Huis ten Bosch, near The Hague, September 1798;3 acquired by the museum, by 1800;4 on loan to the Rijksmuseum Muiderslot, Muiden, 1922-81
Object number: SK-A-346
Copyright: Public domain
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
The event depicted is recounted in Genesis 33:1-10. Jacob and his brother are reconciled following Jacob’s theft of his brother’s birthright by tricking their father Isaac. Beside Jacob are probably his wives Rachel and Leah with their children, behind are the cattle intended by Jacob as a gift for Esau. Esau is shown in armour as a soldier, for his father had said to him ‘And by the sword shalt thou live’ (Genesis 28:40); in the Biblical story, he came accompanied by four hundred men (Genesis 32:6).
But for the landscape, the present work is a copy after the composition depicted by Peter Paul Rubens at the Neues Schloss Schleissheim near Munich5 (rather than after the modello for it as Rooses believed); the Schleissheim painting was sent or taken by Rubens to Madrid in 1628 as one of the group commissioned by King Philip IV of Spain through his aunt, the Archduchess Isabella.6 Rubens left Antwerp for Madrid in the late summer of that year.
There must have existed an unrecorded studio replica, from which the Rijksmuseum picture and other copies were made, because four drawn copies of details are in the so-called ‘Rubens Cantoor’ in the print room of the Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen; these were made by Willem Panneels (c. 1600-1634), left in charge of the studio while Rubens was in Madrid and London.7 The present paining is on an oak support stamped with the mark of its maker, Michiel Claessens, active in Antwerp 1590-1637;8 the wood from the Baltic area would have been ready for use from 1624 but more plausibly from 1630.
Another reduced copy can be seen in the foreground of Willem van Haecht’s (1593-1637) Art Cabinet with Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife,9 which is more faithful to the original in that no landscape background is introduced. Here even more of the neck of the foremost camel is shown, and its head is as misunderstood as it also is in the Rijksmuseum copy. The lances behind Esau are similarly arranged. Van Haecht made copies of paintings for reproduction in engravings10 and may have specialized in individual painted copies as well as in the ‘art cabinets’, for which he is known.11 The handling of the museum picture has little in common with that which could be associated with Rubens; indeed, it might possibly be the work of Van Haecht. But a comparison would have to be made with an accepted copy by Van Haecht on this scale, of which none is as yet in the public domain.
Gregory Martin, 2022
M. Rooses, L’oeuvre de P.P. Rubens. Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, 5 vols., Antwerp 1886-92, I, under no. 109 bis; R.-A. d’Hulst and M. Vandenven, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, III: The Old Testament, London 1989, p. 67, copy (1), under no. 16
1801, p. 49, no. 103; 1809, p. 61, no. 265 (as Rubens ‘Eene Historische Schets’); 1843, p. 52, no. 271 (as a bad copy); 1853, p. 24, no. 241; 1858, p. 120, no. 268; 1864, p. 128, no. 227 (as Rubens); 1880, p. 415-16, no. 486; 1887, p. 145, no. 1226; 1903, p. 231, no. 2096; 1976, p. 186, no. A 346; 1992, p. 81, no. A 346
G. Martin, 2022, 'after Peter Paul Rubens, The Reconciliation Between Jacob and Esau, c. 1628', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5322
(accessed 10 November 2024 17:45:29).