CRITICAL QUOTES

• View of Het Steen (C. V. Wedgwood)

  "Rubens was one of the first to recognise and grasp the significance of landscape as a means of expressing mood, atmosphere and, not least, delight in the natural world."
• A View of Het Steen (C. V. Wedgwood)

  "Rubens painted to give pleasure. He sought, through the medium of his art, to record the beauty of all created things."
• A View of Het Steen (John Constable)


  "In no other branch of art is Rubens greater than in landscape; - the freshness and dewy light, the joyous and animated character which he has imparted to it, impressing on the level monotonous scenery of Flanders all the richness which belongs to its noblest features."
• A View of Het Steen (John Constable)


  "Rubens delighted in phenomena - rainbows upon a stormy sky, - bursts of sunshine, - moonlight, - meteors, - and impetuous torrents mingling their sound with wind and wave."
• A View of Het Steen (Christopher White)

  "Rubens, whose life and work offer such eloquent testimony of both the spirit and the history of the period."
• A View of Het Steen (Neil McGregor)

  "In the paintings we see its countryside as it was meant to be, fertile and sustaining, tended by man under the guidance of God, and, at the end of Rubens's life, providing a home for his family and himself."
• The 19th-century French critic and historian Hippolyte Taine said of him 


  “the whole of human nature is in his grasp, save the loftiest heights. Hence it is that his creativeness is the vastest we have seen.”
• Van Gogh


  “superficial, hollow, bombastic”
• Delacroix

  “carries one beyond the limit scarcely attained by the most eminent painters; he dominates one, he overpowers one, with all his liberty and boldness”