Antwerp 1587 - 1600
Young Peter Paul Rubens was sent to the best school available to him. There he met Moretus, a son of a printer and a friend he would keep all his life. However, after his sister’s marriage to a nobleman his mother could not afford to send him there any longer, the money needed to go to the girl’s dowry. Maria Rubens found a place for him as a page in the court of the Countess de Lalaing.
His duties as a page were to accompany the countess to church and on public appearances. He had classes six hours a day with two other pages and the countess’ two sons. The Count de Lalaing also made certain that the pages were allowed an hour’s canter after mass. He brought them on the hunt, showed them how to handle a falcon, and spent several hours a week teaching them the sword. The Lalaing had a gallery of art and Ruben’s nephew would say that that was when his interest in art was peaked. However, he is the one who decided to break from this lifestyle. He loathed the Countess’s game of dressing up her pages as girls and forcing them to pretend to be such when she entertained guests. The Countess and her ladies treated these boys as dolls and did not resist such things as fondling them. In this vein, one of his fellow pages was incredibly homosexual, so much so that he stopped his activities such as riding and fencing with the other boys. His family did not back him on his desire to quit the court and become an artist, but he defied them, so great was his desire to go.
It is worth noting that sometime around this period Peter Paul Rubens learned about what his father had done. Blandine wrote to Philip, “Peter Paul knows the truth about Papa, and is even angrier and more hurt than you were, because you long suspected what the rest of us tried with diligence to keep from your ears.” This had a grave effect on the young boy’s personality. He had earlier been a normal, outgoing young man. After he found out, Peter Paul Rubens distanced himself from everyone but his family. Even his childhood friends noticed a formal note from him.
This time period was still the revival of Antwerp. People were not yet rich enough to afford great works of art, statues, leather-bound books, and wood carvings. So, to revive the painter’s guild the Roman Catholic Church became the greatest patron of the arts, ordering works both religious and secular.
Around the age of 14, Rubens began to study under Tobias Verhæcht, a traditionalist and landscape artist. At age 17 or 18 he changed his apprenticeship to the studio of Adam van Noort, a figure painter who never deviated from Flemish traditions. Finally, before his 20th birthday he changed to the guidance of the immigrant, Otto van Veen (Otto Venius) where he stayed. It was Venius, a great lover of Italy, who convinced Rubens that his knowledge was incomplete without having seen Italian art. They were from the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke. At the age of 21 he was awarded the rank of Master painter by this guild and admitted.
Continue to Rubens Biography Part 3: Rome 1600-1609