Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  Rubens did not leave England on a high note, but he was nevertheless happy to return to his family and neglected studio in Antwerp. Minus his four-day stopover en route from Madrid to London, he had been absent from home for a year and a half. Little had changed in that time. His house was in order, his cabinet of wonders intact, his exotic garden well tended, and—most important—his two sons in good health. There were celebrations to mark his return and festive meals with his antiquarian friends followed by spirited discussions on matters historical, scientific, and political. Soon, the elegant home on the Wapper had a new resident. On December 6, 1630, just nine months after his return from London, Rubens put an end to his bachelor days. The bride was Helena Fourment, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a respected tapestry dealer with whom he had done business. She was even a relation, though not by blood. (She was a first cousin, by marriage, of Isabella Brant, Rubens’s deceased wife.) Rubens had known her for years, through his connection to the Brant family, and had even used her as a child model. Her older sister, Susanna, had also posed for him. (The intimacy of those portraits, and their number, suggest she might have been something more than a model.) That Helena came from a solid burgher family, and one that he knew well, was especially important to Rubens. In Brussels, it had been proposed that he make a court marriage. He rejected that advice in favor of a bride who “would not blush to see me take my brushes in hand.” Helena was quite happy to watch him practice his art, especially when she was its subject.

  Theirs was a September-May romance, or perhaps a November-February one. The disparity of their ages raised a few eyebrows, but it was not outside the bounds of propriety in an age of short life spans and early maturity, especially for women. Rubens was fifty-three at the time of the wedding and especially ardent; he used his considerable influence to win a special dispensation to marry during Advent, when such rites were normally precluded. Writing to his friend Peiresc, he explained that he was no longer “inclined to lead the abstinent life of a celibate.” To see Helena was to understand his carnal impulse. In a poem delivered during the nuptial festivities, Rubens’s old friend Jan Caspar Gevaerts extolled her virtues, equating her to the heroines of the classical past Rubens so frequently celebrated on canvas:

  Now he owns the living image of Helen of Flanders, who is far more beautiful than her of Troy. Whiter than snow, she is no daughter of the swan that betrayed Leda. She has no mark between her brows, like that which, they say, disfigured the forehead of the daughter of Tyndarus. In her pure soul she unites all the gifts that adorned the maidens of Hellas and Latium. ’Twas thus that Venus, with her golden locks, rose from the sea. ’Twas thus that Thetis became the bride of Peleus, in the days when Thessaly was the home of the great gods. The beauty of her shape is surpassed by the charm of her nature, her spotless simplicity, her innocence, and her modesty.

  Gevaerts may have exaggerated Helena’s virtues, but so did Rubens. In his later years, she became an inexhaustible wellspring of his art. Hers was the face that launched a thousand paintings, and her body countless more. The nude was Rubens’s great métier, and she had the kind of ample figure he had always liked to paint: fleshy and pink in its overwhelming erotic abundance. She was the walking model of his vision of Baroque splendor, and he ravished her on canvas, luxuriating in her body’s every crease, dimple, swell, and curve. Not all of his paintings of her were explicitly erotic. Rubens also depicted his young wife in the finest silks, draped in fur, and strolling about the garden of their Antwerp home with the four children she gave him in their time together. When he died, in 1640, she was pregnant with a fifth.

  Rubens’s plentiful satisfactions at home were tempered by a mounting frustration with political affairs. Responding to a letter of congratulation on his marriage from his friend Jan van den Wouvere, he wrote, “Though I find myself most contented in the conjugal state, as well as in the general happiness over the peace with England, I have occasion to lament my misfortune in ever having become involved in this affair.” Rubens had spent a considerable sum out of his own pocket during his trips to Spain and England, and he was now being jerked around by a series of bureaucrats as he awaited reimbursement. “This seems to me such an insufferable affront and insult that I could almost abjure the form of this government,” he wrote. “I am so disgusted with the court that I do not intend to go for some time to Brussels.”

  For a while, he was able to keep himself from the diplomatic grind. At the beginning of the New Year, Philip himself requested that Isabella dispatch Rubens back to London as an envoy. “One needs proven ministers with whom one is satisfied,” the king wrote. The newly married artist rejected this call from his sovereign, however, and Isabella was forced to find a substitute and then notify her nephew of Rubens’s decision. Philip, in fact, had wanted Rubens to serve as the Spanish ambassador, but the Council of State, still stuck on his professional status, refused to endorse a candidate who “lived by the product of his work.”

  At least the crown paid the money it owed him, and as a gesture of her own appreciation—and perhaps to help make up for the delinquency—the infanta herself presented him with a silver pitcher and basin decorated with antique figures. A few months later, in July 1631, she petitioned Philip to make him a knight of the realm. “He has served Your Majesty in the affairs that Your Majesty and his ministers know, and with all fidelity and satisfaction,” she wrote. “Your Majesty knows him and his good qualities, and knows how rare he is in his profession.” In August, Rubens was officially granted the title caballero.

  The elevation in status was more than just a ceremonial honor. Once again he had been conscripted into diplomatic affairs, and, as Isabella’s petition indicated, the new title would allow him to continue his service “with added luster and authority.” The political necessity that now required his attention was the predicament of his old client Marie de’ Medici. Ever ambitious, the Queen Mother had foolishly become engaged in a power struggle with Richelieu—a losing battle. Knowing that her son Louis XIII had already exiled her once, she might have guessed that she could not count on his filial loyalty. In February 1631, on Richelieu’s orders, she was banished under guard to Compiègne, in northern France. That guard was not careful enough to prevent her escape. Toward the end of July, the fugitive queen crossed over into Flemish territory at Avesnes, seeking asylum and Spanish military support against her son.

  That is where Rubens found her, ego undiminished, even as her circumstances were a good deal less magnificent than those to which she was generally accustomed. Isabella had sent him as a councillor to the marquis d’Aytona, the Spanish ambassador to Brussels, who led the diplomatic delegation. Rubens, Isabella reasoned, would be an ideal intermediary, given his long-standing relationship with Marie. The artist was nothing if not sympathetic to her plight. Indeed, he’d been monitoring her situation with deep concern ever since she had been evicted from her Paris residence. His interest was mercenary as much as it was benevolent. In the months following his return from London, his studio had been engaged in work on the cycle of paintings illustrating the life of Henry IV that Marie had commissioned for the eastern wing of the Luxembourg Palace. The considerable effort he and the studio had devoted to those pictures was now, he thought, “labor entirely wasted.” Payment was almost certainly out of the question. The destitute queen, so recently his greatest patron, now found herself in the uncomfortable position of begging a loan from Rubens. He was happy to provide the funds, though he took a pair of diamonds as collateral. The “mere painter” was now the creditor of a queen of France, and a Medici no less. That must have been some considerable satisfaction.

  Rubens was much more than a pecuniary ally to Marie. After his own experience fending off Richelieu’s attacks in London, Rubens had no love for the cardinal, and found in Marie’s situation an opportunity to engineer his downfall. While the queen had been exiled at Compiègne, her son Gaston, the Duke of Orléans, had escaped to Spanish-controlled Franche-Comté, and from there to
the independent Duchy of Lorraine. Gaston shared his mother’s aversion to Richelieu, and had spent the months of her captivity raising an army to wage a fratricidal war against his brother, Louis XIII. Even before Marie’s escape, Gaston had petitioned Spain for financial support and the right to quarter his soldiers in Spanish-controlled territory. Those entreaties had been received with a certain coolness in both Brussels and Madrid. Richelieu was no friend of Spain, but war with the Dutch was already a severe drain on funds.

  Rubens understood the Spanish reluctance to be drawn into conflict with France, but he considered it worth the price. If Richelieu could be removed from power, Spain would be relieved of a most troublesome foe. In a long and digressive letter to Olivares, he made a passionate argument in favor of intervention against the perfidious minister who “keeps the world in turmoil.” “I have never worked for war, as Your Excellency can confirm, but have always tried, insofar as I have been able, to procure peace everywhere,” he wrote. Richelieu, however, was such an international danger as to warrant action, and not by halves, either. “Surely we have in our time a clear example of how much evil can be done by a favorite who is motivated more by personal ambition than regard for the public welfare or the service of his king,” he wrote. That phrase might easily have applied to Buckingham or even Olivares himself, but Rubens was careful to place Richelieu in direct contrast to the count-duke, whom he praised as “a minister endowed with courage and prudence, who aspires to nothing but the true glory and grandeur of the king, his master.” Rubens thought it was just the right time to plumb the count-duke’s wells of courage: “It would be so unreasonable to let slip an opportunity the like of which has not presented itself for one hundred years, that one ought to make a virtue out of necessity.” Removing so dangerous a foe would be worth the cost, even if the bill ran into the millions.

  Rubens sent his treatise to Olivares on the first day of August. Two weeks later Olivares presented his argument before the Council of State, in Madrid. Their conclusion was unanimous: the painter, though well-meaning, was operating at a level above his capacity. There would be no Spanish intervention against Richelieu. Even with Spanish support, the count-duke questioned Gaston’s ability to remove the cardinal. The potential costs of failure—financially, militarily, politically—were simply too high. If Gaston could independently demonstrate an ability to win in the field, Spain might reconsider, but until then it would be Olivares’s policy to press for another reconciliation between Marie and her other son, Louis XIII.

  Rubens’s stalwart support, though ineffective in rallying the count-duke, still garnered him the appreciation of the Queen Mother. Jean Puget de la Serre, a member of her entourage, wrote a glowing tribute to the painter after Marie visited his Antwerp home. “His judgment in affairs of state and his intellect and self-control exalt him so high above the rank of his profession, that the works of his wisdom are as remarkable and admirable as those of his brush. Her Majesty enjoyed extreme contentment in contemplating the animated marvels of his pictures.” The cash advance also didn’t hurt.

  MARIE HAD ESCAPED FRANCE, but the political situation in Flanders was not especially stable either. In the year following Rubens’s return from England, the infanta’s grip on power had become alarmingly precarious. The Anglo-Spanish alliance Rubens negotiated in London, however impressive in its own right, had little restraining effect on the Dutch, as had been hoped. A string of Dutch victories in the field, combined with continued economic hardship at home, bred a growing resentment of Spanish stewardship within the Flemish population. Madrid placed blame for the sad state of affairs in the Low Countries on Isabella and her poorly functioning, underfinanced administration. Locals looked askance at Madrid, which effectively controlled Flemish domestic and foreign policy. Even Rubens was angry. “It appears that Spain is willing to give this country as booty to the first occupant, leaving it without money and without any order,” he wrote. The Flemish aristocracy, which had been jealous of its lost prerogatives ever since the Duke of Alva’s reign of terror, was particularly impatient with the infanta, who was accused by her enemies of being a mere puppet of Spain.

  With the threat of an internal insurrection dangerously close to reality late in 1631, Isabella summoned Rubens to Coudenberg Palace. The painter, who had so recently lobbied for war with France, was now conscripted to secretly broker a peace deal with its Dutch ally, this time through direct negotiation with Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange. That, in theory, would solve everyone’s problems, at least temporarily. Peace would breed some modicum of prosperity in Flanders, and thereby placate the restive population. Spain could hardly afford the continued fighting. Isabella’s personal situation was so volatile that Madrid would just have to accept what terms could be drawn. For months she had been bickering with Olivares, who had grown disconsolate over the state of affairs in his crumbling empire. “I know that I get nothing right, and never will,” he wrote to her in June. Across the Dutch border, Frederick Henry had shown himself to be a willing and reasonable negotiating partner. By December 1631, he had supplied Rubens with a passport allowing him free passage into enemy territory. When Isabella dispatched her agent, he left carrying “full power to give the fatal stroke unto Mars.”

  Rubens made the trip to The Hague in three days, arriving on a Tuesday evening after a stopover at Bergen op Zoom. He kept a low profile during the trip, not wanting to arouse suspicion along the way. After he had returned, he told Balthasar Gerbier, now acting as an English agent in Brussels, that he had not been identified on the journey. In the Dutch capital, he took a suite of rooms at an inn close to the Oude Hof, the prince’s residence, and sent a messenger there with a request for an audience. A short while later, Frederick’s secretary arrived at his door.

  Rubens could not have been happy to see who had come to greet him. It was the man he called “Junius,” the same corrupt official he had accused of taking “bribes with both hands” years earlier, when he had enlisted the support of the lawyer Pieter van Veen to secure copyright privileges for his prints in Holland. Rubens and Junius had also crossed paths during the secret negotiations Rubens managed through his cousin Jan Brant, “the Catholic.” As ever, his presence was a poor omen of things to come. The Prince of Orange, he informed Rubens, was greatly astonished that the painter had come to Holland. Indeed, he told the painter, he would make “a good capture” for the prince. If Rubens hoped to avoid becoming a prisoner of war, he should turn around and retrace his steps at once.

  This wasn’t quite the reception Rubens had been expecting, but he correctly surmised that he was being tested. After noting that he had come on a passport issued by Frederick himself, he composed a pleading note to the prince, begging the opportunity to speak with him and going heavy on the obsequiousness, as was his wont. Junius delivered it, and soon after there was another knock on his door. This time it was a page, and he was there to escort Rubens to the Oude Hof.

  Late in the evening, with important business at stake, neither Rubens nor the prince would have broached the rather unsavory shared family history that made them distant familial relations, even if both men were surely aware of it. (Christina von Dietz, daughter of Jan Rubens and Anna of Saxony, was a stepsister of both men.) Instead, Rubens moved directly to the subject at hand: a truce that would bring peace to the Low Countries. He had been granted authority to strike a bargain with the prince, in which Spain would relinquish a series of Flemish cities, including hard-won Breda, in exchange for Pernambuco, the sugar-rich Portuguese colony on the coast of Brazil, captured by the Dutch in 1630. For Isabella, this was a considerable territorial sacrifice, but one that Olivares could live with back in Madrid, as it protected what was most vital to the Spanish crown—the colonial empire that filled its treasury. It was, perhaps, a generous offer, but Frederick Henry was in no position to accept it, at least on his own. Any treaty would have to win the approval of the full Dutch States General, and after the long disputations of the groote werck he was not
especially sanguine about the prospect of achieving it, even if he supported the Spanish proposal himself. With that, and a promise to keep channels open, Rubens was dismissed.

  That meeting was somewhat less than hopeful, but Rubens didn’t give up on his efforts to rally the prince. A month later, at the beginning of February, he wrote to Frederick Henry, pressing him on the terms they had discussed, and he followed that up with another letter two weeks hence. The prince never replied. At the end of March, the frustrated painter wrote once more to The Hague, this time to Constantijn Huygens, an adviser to Frederick (he was also a great connoisseur, and Rembrandt’s first champion), inquiring in a rather passive-aggressive tone as to whether the prince had even received his letters. Frederick had read them, Huygens replied, but they were still subject to “deliberations.” Rubens got the message, and passed it on to Isabella. “I do not see that it is possible to make any further efforts on our side for now,” he wrote.

  Frederick wasn’t interested in negotiating because, in the months after Rubens’s visit to The Hague, the run of the war had tipped heavily in his favor. In February 1632, just as Rubens was sending his pleading letters to Frederick, Isabella learned that her most distinguished and influential general, Henri de Bergh, had defected to the Dutch side, taking with him all of the troops under his command. Shortly thereafter, she uncovered a ring of aristocratic conspirators plotting her overthrow. Spain’s enemies, and even its allies, were quick to exploit this situation for their own benefit. Richelieu did all he could to encourage the plotters. They also received intelligence from Balthasar Gerbier, a man always happy to place himself at the center of an intrigue, never mind his long-standing friendship with Rubens and his many years working to bring peace to Spain and England. Gerbier’s various enemies had always thought him shameless and unreliable, and his actions proved those judgments entirely valid. He even took to spying on Rubens, his erstwhile negotiating partner and houseguest, though without much success. “I got nothing out of him,” he wrote. Gerbier did, however, take the rather extreme measure of having the painter tailed. Rubens never found out.