Peter Paul Rubens Art Prints

He was born in 1577 in Siegen, in present-day Germany, where his father, from an old Antwerp family, was obliged to live after a spell in prison, and the family returned to Antwerp in 1590. He had a humanist schooling in Latin and the classics, and later wrote letters in five languages. Eight years in Italy from 1600 brought him face to face with Titian, Michelangelo and the new naturalism of Caravaggio. In Genoa he painted the Marchesa Brigida Spinola Doria, then a bride of about twenty-two, dressed in satin and lace; the canvas has since been cut down, losing the garden behind her.

Back in Antwerp in 1609 he became court painter to the Spanish Netherlands, married Isabella Brant and designed his own house and studio, now the Rubenshuis. The studio worked like a firm: Anthony van Dyck trained there, specialists such as the animal painter Frans Snyders added details, and engravers turned his pictures into prints that he protected with an early form of copyright. Altarpieces such as The Raising of the Cross for Antwerp's cathedral made him Flanders' leading painter, and in 1621 the French queen mother, Marie de' Medici, commissioned a cycle celebrating her life, now in the Louvre. The catalogue of his work runs to 1,403 pieces.

In Daniel in the Lions' Den, painted around 1615, the lions are life-size, and the picture later hung in Charles I's Whitehall palace. After Isabella's death he married Helena Fourment in 1630, and she became the model for the full figures of his late work, including The Three Graces and The Judgement of Paris, where viewers recognised her as Venus. In The Garden of Love, look for the symbols of married love scattered through the party: cupids, a pair of doves and Juno's peacock. He died in Antwerp in 1640 and is buried in Saint James' Church.