Description
An idyllic pastoral scene, A View Of Het Steen At Dawn portrays the beautiful manor house on the outskirts of Antwerp where Rubens happily spent the last five years of his life. Painted in 1636 while the artist was suffering from gout, his shaky hands made the work seem less precise than his earlier works, though it is nonetheless considered one of the best landscapes of the 17th century. Once owned by the British patron of the arts Sir George Beaumont, a friend of the painter John Constable, it is likely that A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning helped influence the English landscape painter's work.
Peter Paul Rubens was the greatest public artist of the 17th century. He was invited to palaces and great churches throughout Europe to paint grand state portraits, rituals of the Catholic faith, and opulent allegories. But in this landscape he celebrates what he treasured the most: the prosperity and peace of Flanders, his homeland.
In 1630 Rubens returned to Antwerp exhausted and in poor health. His beloved first wife, Isabella Brant, had died four years earlier, but now he was able to find domestic bliss again with his second wife, Hélène Fourment. There would be no more diplomatic missions. He took on a few portraits and other commissions, but concentrated on the type of paintings he wanted to do for himself: landscapes. Rubens had been ennobled both in Spain by Philip IV and in England by Charles I; in 1635 this status and wealth enabled him to purchase the manor of Het Steen, near Mechelen (now known as Mechelen), with the approval of the Council of Brabant (such a purchase was not open to persons of lesser rank or prosperity).
The 16th century manor castle with park, meadows and meadows was a place of retreat in the summer months. There Rubens was able to regain his health and paint the landscapes he loved rather than the subjects he was obliged to paint for his patrons. At the time, landscapes were considered inferior in status to large images of historical events or Biblical stories and to portraits of high-level people. Only genre paintings were considered to be of a lower order. Rubens was one of the first to recognize and grasp the importance of landscape as a means of expressing mood, atmosphere and, not least, delight in the natural world. His nephew wrote that the Het Steen estate gave the artist the opportunity to "paint vividly and from nature the surrounding mountains, plains, valleys, and meadows, an early-morning autumn landscape with a view of Het Steen.
On a crisp autumn morning, the rising sun casts a cool light on Het Steen's mansion. The low rays of the sun flicker across the vast surrounding landscape, bringing it and the inhabitants to life. The shadows are long and there is a hint of dew on the grass in the meadows. The windows of the manor house and the stream that meanders beside it twinkle, and the few feathery clouds are tinged with gold. We are high up, so the view stretches out before us, allowing us to select each incident within the ensemble, from the tiny, almost invisible, towers of the city in the distance to the towers of the manor house nearby. A man with a gun and a stalking dog crouches, ready to shoot the partridge feeding nearby. The milkmaids are already working among the cows in the field beyond. To the left, colors soften in the shade of tall, lanky birch trees. A couple headed to market in their stout farm cart, the rosy-cheeked wife enthroned on a heap of their goods, a giant brass milk jug on her arm. Behind them, the lord and lady of the manor take a stroll while a nursemaid cradles their baby and a man fishes for breakfast in the moat.
Viewing high also allows us to see how the wide panorama is achieved through bands of color that stretch across the image: browns enhanced with deep red for the foreground, greens and golds for the middle, and blues for the foreground. the misty distance This was the 'bird's eye view' of traditional Flemish landscapes and one of the last in this style to be painted by Rubens. Many of his other landscapes still have a high vantage point, but in them we look at the scene from below rather than outward, focusing on one incident. The far distance is often blocked with rocks and trees, as in The Watering Place, another of his most famous landscapes.
Rubens painted this painting for his own delight, perhaps as a sign of a life well lived and a reward well earned. We can be reasonably sure that it was never commissioned because of the oak panel or panels on which it is painted. The supports for other large paintings intended for wealthy patrons, such as Samson and Delilah, are always found in no more than two or perhaps three large sections. The support for this work, however, seems to have been cobbled together from several small and irregularly shaped panels in an almost haphazard fashion, with bits added and fixed with short boards as Rubens progressed, a method unacceptable to a collector.
The painting was in Rubens's possession when he died, along with its companion, The Rainbow Landscape (now in the Wallace Collection, London). That work, which is also painted on patched panels, offers a different view of his estate at night. The paintings are believed to have once hung in Rubens' house, on opposite walls of the same room. The middle wall had a window, and the paintings were probably placed so that the sunlight entering the room matched that depicted in each work. The sun shines from the left in The Rainbow Landscape, so that work probably hung on the right-hand wall; in An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, the sun appears on the right, so it must have hung on the wall on the left.