Pictures of Rubens Biography

Eugene Fromanten. Rector of the Church of St. John would have agreed with me and, speaking by conscience, would be right. This picture has just been restored. Now it stands on the floor of the school hall, leaned against the white wall, under a glass roof, poured with light, without a frame, in its entire original sharpness, strength and purity.

But with a more careful study of the picture, if you look at it from top to bottom - in this adverse position for her, it turns out that she, I will not say, is rude, since genuine skill is somewhat exaltation of her style, but “material”, if only this word can express what I mean. Its construction is witty, but somewhat limited and in its character is vulgar.

She lacks that- I do not know how to convey it- that Rubens always succeeds when he concerns the ordinary: some kind of note of grace, tenderness, something like a lovely smile, allowing him to forgive the rudeness of the devil. Christ, pushed to the right, into the depths of the wings, is only an accessory of this picture depicting fish fishing, and His gesture, like a face, is insignificant.

His cloak, ugly red, stands out sharply in the blue sky, heavily spoiled, as it seems to me, in later corrections. The apostle Peter, written somewhat carelessly, but in beautiful valers of wine-red tone, is the only gospel face in this scene, if you can think about the gospel before this picture intended for fishermen and written from them. In any case, he speaks with Christ exactly as the uncouth old man from the common people in such strange circumstances could say.

He presses a blue sailor hat to his frowned chest reddish from a tan, and, of course, not Rubens to make a mistake in a truthful image of such a gesture. As for the two naked torso, of which one is inclined to the viewer, and the other is turned with their backs, and both have shoulders in the forefront, they stand out among the best “academic” pieces of Rubens painting by that free and confident manner, which, without a doubt, at once, in several hours, they were thrown with strokes, clear, even, rich, not too currently and not too dense, not very fluid and not too dense.

Without excessive relief and without complaints. This is Yordan, but Yordan is impeccable, without excessive red tones, without glare. By its ability to see the body, not meat, is the best lesson that his great friend could give Yordans. A fisherman with the head of the Scandinavian type, with a beard fluttering in the wind, with golden hair, blond eyes on a flaming face, in tall fishing boots and a red jacket is amazing.

And, as usual, in all the paintings of Rubens, where the extremely bright red color makes a calming impression, this fiery figure softens everything else, acting on the mesh shell of the eye and forcing him to see a shade of green in all adjacent colors. Among the side figures, pay attention to a major guy, a Jung, standing in the second boat and leaning on the oar.

He is dressed somehow: in gray pants, a purple, too short vest, unbuttoned and opening a bare stomach. All the characters of the picture are oily, red, tanned, with skin tanned and swollen from sharp winds, from the fingertips to the shoulders, from the forehead to the back of the head. Sea salt corroded everything that was naked, revived the blood, saturated the skin, fanned her veins, forced her to cure a white body, as if she painted everything with cinnabar.

That's how rudely and accurately transmitted life. All this was seen on the embankments of the shelders man, generally, but correctly distinguishing both colors and forms that appreciates the truth, when it is expressive, not afraid to roughly convey rude things, incomparably knowing its job and not afraid of anything. Thanks to some circumstances that allowed me to see this picture near and understanding the work of the master as well as if Rubens performed it in front of me, I managed to discover one feature in it: it seems to be dedicating us to all my secrets, she nevertheless amazes us, as if not opening a single one.

I already told you about this before I received a new confirmation here. It is difficult to understand not the very technique of Rubens, but how, with its help, it reaches a high degree of perfection. Rubens are simple, its method is elementary. This is a wonderful panel, smooth, clean and bright, on which there is an amazingly fast, clever, sensitive and restrained hand. The rapid passion, usually attributed to Rubens, is manifested more likely in the nature of his sensations than in the disorder of the letter.

His brush is as calm as his soul is fiery and his mind is rapid. Rubens has such an accurate correspondence and the rapid interaction between vision, feeling and hand and such perfect obedience to each other that the impressions that the brain that controls the action receives are immediately transmitted to the instrument. Nothing is so deceptive as this apparent fever, restrained by deep calculation and uses a mechanism that has successfully passed all sorts of trials.

The same can be said about visual perception, and therefore the selection of colors.The colors themselves are very elementary and seem difficult only thanks to the effects extracted from them by the artist, and the role that he makes them play. The number of primary colors is very limited by Rubens, and nothing is calculated as accurately as a way of contrasting each other.

It is extremely simple and the manner of nuances them. But even more amazing the result obtained by Rubens. None of the color tones of Rubens is rare in itself. If you take its red color, it will be easy for you to determine its formula: it consists of cinnabar and ocher, in the same way mixed, almost without shades. If you look at the shades of black color, you will see that they are all made up of burned ivory and, together with whitewater, give all imaginary combinations of deaf or pale gray tones.

Blue colors are random; The yellow color, which the artist feels and applies worse than others, with the exception of the gold, the warmth and strength of which he feels excellently, serves, like a red, double goal: firstly, it allows you to transfer light not only on the basis of white tones, and secondly, it indirectly affects neighboring colors, forcing them to change; For example, it gives a purple hue and revives an insignificant sad-gray paint that seems completely neutral on the palette.

All this, one might say, is not so unusual.