Rubens and Van Dyck at Dulwich

A workshop rather than a single name

From 1609, Rubens ran one of the busiest workshops in Europe in Antwerp: such an influx of commissions that he permanently employed assistants and specialists, each responsible for one part of a painting — drapery, landscape backgrounds, animals — under Rubens's own supervision, which varied a great deal depending on the commission and its price. Van Dyck, who came to work there very young, was therefore not a simple pupil sitting at an easel: he was a paid collaborator, whose hand can be found in certain canvases signed by Rubens, before he went on to develop an independent practice.

The six paintings by Rubens and three by Van Dyck brought together in this room make it possible to compare the two hands only a few years apart — a rare exercise, since most museums hold only one or two examples of each.

1. Rubens: Venus, Mars and Cupid, and Hagar in the Desert

Venus, Mars and Cupid, painted around 1635, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), stages an allegory of the triumph of peace over war, of love over hate — a subject Rubens, also a diplomat in the service of the Spanish Habsburgs, treated more than once, at a time when he was himself negotiating, alongside his painting, attempts at peace between European powers.

Hagar in the Desert, painted around 1630-1632, dates from the year Rubens remarried, to Hélène Fourment, then sixteen years old — a second marriage art historians have often linked to the resurgence of biblical scenes centred on female figures in his output of this period. An infrared examination has revealed elements of the original composition now lost, notably an angel in the sky and the infant Ishmael lying on the ground — proof that Rubens reworked his composition as he went rather than following a fixed plan from the outset.

Portrait of a Lady, painted around 1625, remains a painting of disputed identity: the sitter was long identified as Hélène Fourment, Rubens's second wife, before that reading was challenged in favour of her sister. A preparatory chalk study, held at the Albertina in Vienna, carries an inscription naming Katherine Manners, Duchess of Buckingham — itself a contested lead, since Katherine Manners never left England to sit for either work. Beyond the meticulously finished face, the cuffs and right hand remain sketched in with broad, almost unfinished strokes.

2. Rubens: two preparatory sketches

Saint Barbara fleeing from her Father, a modello painted around 1620, belongs to the sketches Rubens prepared for the ceiling of the new Jesuit church in Antwerp: a contract signed on 29 March 1620 called for thirty-one canvases for that ceiling, including several scenes from the lives of saints destined for the side aisles. Saint Barbara was meant for an octagonal setting in the south aisle — hence this modello's octagonal border. The whole decorative scheme was destroyed by fire in 1718; these preparatory sketches are now the only visual record of what the ceiling once showed.

The Three Graces, a grisaille sketch painted around 1636, shows the three mythological figures caught mid-leap, one foot still on the ground, the other in the air. The grisaille technique, limited to a range of greys, was often used to prepare a sculpture: here Rubens demonstrates, like a sculptor working in the round, his ability to render the same body from several angles — front, side, and back — within a single composition.

3. Van Dyck: Samson and Delilah, before the English court

Samson and Delilah, painted around 1618-1620, belongs to the very earliest part of Van Dyck's career, while he was working in Rubens's Antwerp workshop, twenty-two years his senior. The painting directly takes up the subject of a Rubens canvas on the same theme (c. 1609-1610) — so closely that it long circulated under the master's name rather than the pupil's. Van Dyck nonetheless distinguishes himself through personal choices: Rubens sets his scene at night, in a bedchamber, at the moment when Samson's hair is already being cut; Van Dyck chooses broad daylight, outdoors, and the very last instant before the fatal act — a way of telling the same story through its tension rather than its outcome.

Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Oneglia, painted in 1624, already belongs to a different stage of Van Dyck's career: painted in Palermo, Sicily, where the painter stayed with this viceroy for a summer, this betrothal portrait — the prince had just signed a marriage contract with Maria Gonzaga of Mantua — remains one of the masterpieces of his youth; the armour he wears, decorated with emblems of the House of Savoy, is now held at the Royal Armoury in Madrid. Shortly after the sitting ended, the painting was found lying face down in the prince's chamber, which he took as an ill omen — he died of the plague a few weeks later, on 3 August 1624. It is this same Antwerp and Italian period, before Van Dyck left for Italy and then became, from 1632, the official portraitist to the court of Charles I of England, that this room shows — a handling still close to his master's, before the more composed elegance that would make his British reputation.

4. Two careers that carry Antwerp elsewhere

Sir Peter Lely, born in the Netherlands, settled in England in 1643 and came through the English Revolution unscathed: he painted both parliamentarians, including Oliver Cromwell, and royalist nobility. After the Restoration of 1660, Charles II named him "Principal Painter in Ordinary" in 1661, the same title and the same annual salary — £200 — that Van Dyck had received under the previous reign: the continuity between the two men is thus not only stylistic, it is also institutional. Nymphs by a Fountain, painted around 1650, belongs to a vein Lely would almost entirely abandon afterward: a mythological, narrative scene rather than a portrait, five sleeping nymphs at the foot of a fountain adorned with a dolphin and putti — a rare surviving example of what Lely painted before turning almost exclusively to portraiture.

David Teniers the Younger, an Antwerp painter of genre scenes — taverns, peasant festivities, guardroom interiors —, took on a rather different role from 1651: appointed curator of the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in Brussels, he painted several views of the prince's gallery to record it, before overseeing the engraving of the entire collection in the Theatrum Pictorium, published in Antwerp in 1659 — one of the very first illustrated art catalogues ever printed. The Chaff-cutter, dated before 1690 and probably painted around 1645, shows a humbler farmyard scene: a bald old man cutting straw into chaff to feed a white horse, a woman in a red and blue dress standing in a doorway in the background — the peasant side of his work, the opposite of the princely collections he otherwise documented.

5. Van Dyck elsewhere in the gallery: a court portrait and a face in death

George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol (about 1638, oil on canvas, 103.2 × 83.2 cm, Room 4) shows the poet, playwright and politician (1612-1677) on the eve of his election as MP for Dorset in 1640 and his elevation to Baron Digby in 1641. An ardent Royalist during the Civil War, he fled to France and served in the French army; appointed secretary of state by Charles II in 1657, he converted to Catholicism and lost favour. Hand on hip, elbow jutting into the viewer’s space, a swathe of satin over his shoulder, the sitter evokes power and psychological presence; Van Dyck models the bluish shadows around the eyes with a scumble laid over the flesh tones.

Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed (1633, oil on canvas, 74.3 × 81.8 cm, Room 10): Venetia Stanley (1600-1633), a wit and beauty of Charles I’s court, had eloped and married Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), a diplomat, naval commander, poet and scientist, in 1625. She died suddenly in her sleep on 30 April 1633, and her husband quickly summoned Van Dyck. The painting was finished several weeks later; in a letter to his brother Sir Kenelm called it “the Master peece of all the excellent ones that ever Sir Anthony Vandike made,” noting that only a rose lying on the hem of the sheet had been added, its petals fading, an emblem of the state of her body. Van Dyck depicts Venetia as if falling asleep, her left eye still coming to a close.

How much time

Allow a little over an hour for these rooms, stopping to compare directly the two Samson and Delilah paintings — Van Dyck's here, Rubens's which can be sought out in reproduction to gauge the gap between them.

Venus, Mars and Cupid (Rubens) — 7 minutes.
Hagar in the Desert (Rubens) — 7 minutes.
Portrait of a Lady (Rubens) — 6 minutes.
Saint Barbara fleeing from her Father (Rubens) — 5 minutes.
The Three Graces (Rubens) — 5 minutes.
Samson and Delilah (Van Dyck) — 8 minutes.
Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy (Van Dyck) — 6 minutes.
Nymphs by a Fountain (Lely) — 6 minutes.
The Chaff-cutter (Teniers) — 5 minutes.
George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol (Van Dyck, Room 4) — 6 minutes.
Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed (Van Dyck, Room 10) — 7 minutes.

Sources and verification

Facts checked against the Dulwich Picture Gallery website and cross-checked sources (Wikipedia FR/EN, Art UK) for dates, dimensions and attributions.

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Rubens and his pupil: the Flemish room at Dulwich