Peter Paul Rubens’s enchanting late landscapes enjoy special status within his oeuvre. Painted for his own pleasure, they seem to form an island, set apart from a vast continent of commissioned output featuring learned historical, religious, and mythological themes. Scholarly approaches have measured Rubens’s landscape production against that of his Flemish predecessors, have pointed out its close relationship to classical pastoral literature, and have charted its outsized impact on later landscape painting.
On the occasion of the temporary reunion of the Courtauld Gallery’s own Landscape by Moonlight (1635—40) with the Barber Institute of Fine Art’s A Landscape Near Het Steen (1635—40), this talk will by contrast explore the relation of Rubens’s landscapes with the actual terrain. Cartography, topography, and newly discovered archival documents will allow us to stitch together a group of paintings so as to achieve a sense of space and a feel for the landscape that inspired Rubens. While previous studies have often stressed the idyllic nature of the landscapes, it is worth exploring their relation to ownership and to the reality of what was very much a working landscape.
Rubens’s omissions from that working landscape are revealing, with proto-industrial sites, even those right next to his country estate Het Steen, emphatically ignored. Nonetheless, while a contemporary noted that the artist’s preference was to show the landscape surrounding him ‘un poco aiutato’, in many ways Rubens takes great care to reveal the exact location of the landscapes to local or knowledgeable viewers. At the same time, the pictures contain witty clues of a highly personal nature that reveal that Rubens easily combined the seemingly opposed qualities of both the exacting surveyor and the lofty poet.
The Barber in London: Highlights from a Remarkable Collection is on display at the Courtauld Gallery until the 28 June 2026, and included with the permanent collection ticket.
Organised by Dr Chloe Nahum, Bridget Riley Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow, and Dr Ketty Gottardo, Martin Halusa Senior Curator of Drawings, the Courtauld Gallery.
Speaker:
Dr Bert Watteeuw studied art history and social and cultural anthropology at the KU Leuven. After a PhD fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders, he joined the Rubenianum, Antwerp, as a researcher in 2011. Since 2015, he has been employed by the Rubenshuis, Musea Antwerpen, combining research with museum work. In 2021, he was appointed director of the Rubenshuis, where with his colleagues he is implementing a ten year architectural masterplan. He is closely involved in the restoration of Rubens’s country estate Het Steen. Research interests include the life and work of Peter Paul Rubens, the museology of historic houses, Anthony Van Dyck, portraiture, the history of dress, and the art history of disability.
