How will the British public take to Rubens’s fatties?

This week a monumental exhibition, Rubens and His Legacy, is opening at the Royal Academy. It makes the case — surely correct — that the Flemish master was among the most influential figures in European art. There are few painters of the 18th or 19th century — from Joshua Reynolds to Cézanne, Watteau to Constable — who were not affected by his work. It will be interesting, however, to discover what the London art public feel about Rubens himself.

The British have had a complicated relationship with the great man. Its apex is represented by his residence in London — admittedly for a brief nine months in 1629–30 — his knighthood and the pleasure expressed by Charles I at meeting ‘a person of such merit’. The nadir, perhaps, came in 1647 when his ‘Crucifixion’, which hung on the altar of Queen Henrietta Maria’s private (Catholic) chapel in Somerset House, was removed by order of Parliament, run through with a sword and flung into the Thames.

Rubens, it seems safe to say, appeals to our cavalier side but less to the puritanical streak that runs through the national psyche. For some the fleshy amplitude of his figures — what might be termed ‘the cellulite factor’ — is a barrier to appreciating his art (although as a nation we are becoming more Rubenesque: the gluttons tumbling to perdition in his ‘Last Judgement’ have figures you could encounter on any high street today).

From the beginning of the relationship there was mutual interest between Rubens and English collectors — but also a degree of suspicion. In 1618 the artist traded a group of his own works with Dudley Carleton, British ambassador to The Hague, in exchange for the latter’s collection of classical antiquities. During the negotiations, Carleton and his agents were interested in how much of each picture the master himself had actually painted.