Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 26 April
If you felt deprived of snow this Christmas, hasten along to The Queen’s Gallery, for there, in a splendid exhibition of Flemish painting from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, is one of the best snow-scenes ever — Bruegel’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1565–7). You may think this too grisly a subject for the season of good will, and the Emperor Rudolf II thought so too, for the painting was bowdlerised at his orders in the early 17th century. Rudolf did not approve of Bruegel’s satire, which cast the Flemish townspeople as the innocents and the Imperial troops as their murderers (standing in for Herod’s men in the original Bible story). The panel was overpainted to render the image less inflammatory, and to look like a scene of plunder rather than massacre. Today, we can see through some of this overpainting and glimpse the shadows of the original imagery; further information is available from X-rays. Bruegel’s picture was indeed a savage indictment of the Spanish rule of the Southern Netherlands, but it remains a beautiful painting.
It forms the centrepiece of the first room of this enjoyable exhibition. The fluidity of paintwork and variety of expression are utterly brilliant. Consider the filligree patterns the leafless boughs of the trees make against the snowy roofs, or the very effective blue of the sky, scumbled over a paler ground. The details are telling in a typical Bruegel manner: the pollarded willows at front right, the soldiers climbing in through windows, the great blue icicles hanging from roofs. The domestic animals and birds which were used to disguise the slaughtered children, the turkeys, geese, pig and calf, are not particularly well-painted or convincing, but they do make a powerful contrast with the massed phalanx of armoured soldiery in the centre of the composition. It’s a scene of great animation and immense skill, powerful enough to hold the attention for far longer than the average museum picture.
For this painting alone, the exhibition is worth seeing, but there are other treasures here. In the first room are some rather fine portraits, several on the distinctive green background favoured by the period. Here are Quinten Massys’s famous portrait of Erasmus and an anonymous portrayal of Emperor Charles V, showing off the distinctive Habsburg jaw. The white faces of the children of Christian II of Denmark loom ghostly above what looks like an early Lucian Freud still-life. There is also a rather impressive and lavish painting of ‘The Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell’ (interesting yellow and pink colour arrangement), and a sensitive and likeable ‘Jonah under his Gourd’, both by Marten van Heemskerck. All this before we enter the main gallery.
The chief attractions of the large room are the Rubens landscapes, but before we come to them, there’s a dense grouping of small paintings — what they call A Cabinet Hang — showing how these pictures might have been displayed by owners or art dealers. The first picture you see in this gallery is the rather repulsive ‘Boy at a Window’, his rubbery face peering through the leads. Next to it are a couple of oil on copper landscapes by Jan Bruegel the Elder, the son of Pieter Bruegel of the snow-scene, known as Velvet Bruegel on account of his rich colours and exquisite technique. He gives us a ‘Garden of Eden’ with macaws, swans, leopards and lions, and ‘A Village Festival’, a less inventive crowd scene than his father’s, but beautifully put-together and colour-rhymed in red, blue and buff.
The three Rubens landscapes are ‘Winter: The Interior of a Barn’ on the right wall, ‘Summer: Peasants Going to the Market’, opposite, and ‘Milkmaid with Cattle in a Landscape’ on the end wall. ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’ were not necessarily painted as a pair, and are very different. ‘Summer’ is a vast panorama, while ‘Winter’ focuses on roofed-over areas of outbuilding with some sections of wall, a place where inside and outside meet, rather than a straightforward interior. The Cattle landscape is particularly lyrical and effective (the trees especially fine) despite the crowd of unconvincing birds. All three show how superb a landscape painter Rubens was though he is most often thought of as a figure artist. Compare his portraits on either side of this landscape: a marvellous self-portrait and a sumptuous gold-and-black ‘Portrait of a Woman’. It remains for me only to commend the Van Dycks, my favourite being the confrontational portrait of his mistress Margaret Lemon.
It’s a good-sized show of 51 works, not too overpowering for a morning or afternoon’s viewing, with the option to see more of the Queen’s Collection in the other galleries: the gorgeous Rockingham bone china masquerading as corn stooks and tree stems; or the amazing collaborative painting Rubens did with the still-life expert Frans Snyders, the former painting the seductive figures of Diana and her Nymphs, the latter the dead game surrounding them, a picture which seems to foreshadow Courbet; or John Michael Wright’s wonderful triple portrait of the comic actor John Lacey in tartan trews. A visit to The Queen’s Gallery is a pleasure indeed.
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