The Hammock Papers: Rubens

Showing posts with label Rubens. Show all posts

28 June 2026

Happy Birthday, Peter Paul Rubens

Rubens, Venus, Cupid, Bacchus and Ceres, 1613

Peter Paul Rubens was born on this day in 1577.

28 June 2025

Realize.

Rubens, Bust of Pseudo-Seneca, 1626

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from Letters from a Stoic

Happy Birthday, Peter Paul Rubens

Rubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles, 1612

A painting, if the light is just so, can turn into a luminescent inferno which may reveal for just a moment the soul of the artist.

Peter Paul Rubens, born on this day in 1577

Gallery of the Masters: Peter Paul Rubens

23 November 2024

Transfixed.

Rubens, Self-Portrait,1638

Good Lord ...

I remember going to the Uffizi 20 years ago, and tourists were walking around like zombies taking video footage of the entire experience, not pausing to look at the work. I’m in favor of tolerating hybrid spectatorship, where you look at the work and maybe take a photo as well. Obviously, going too far in either direction is also not great: If you’re only experiencing something through mediation, why are you there? And the “slow looking” movement comes across as pretty conservative—it’s excessively reverential and technophobic. I want to make a case for both being possible, for being with your phone as a way of close looking.

It was 1994.

We had left home early in order to arrive when the doors of The Toledo Museum of Art opened.

It was The Age of Rubens exhibition.

Brushstrokes. I can still see the light above the painting revealing the individual furrows created by the individual hairs of the brush that Rubens had held to paint that glove 350 years prior to that moment. We were there nearly all day, but kept coming back to that painting to gaze in astonishment at time, visibly streaked across that canvas.

Transfixed.

On the way home we stopped for dinner at a restaurant that had bagna cauda on the menu. I can still hear her faint giggle as she leaned in, allowing me to gently dab the glistening olive oil from her chin with my starched white napkin, her eyes fixed on mine as she continued chewing and smiling.

What a grand day. No pictures were taken. None were needed.

28 June 2024

Happy Birthday, Rubens

Rubens, Portrait of a Dominican Friar, 1640

Peter Paul Rubens was born on this day in 1577.

07 July 2023

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

28 June 2023

Happy Birthday, Rubens

Rubens, Study of Two Heads, 1609

My talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size, has ever surpassed my courage.

Peter Paul Rubens, born on this day in 1577

Don't miss Waldemar Januszczak's Rubens: An Extra Large Story ...

03 January 2023

Had.

Rubens, Bust of Pseudo-Seneca, 1626

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from Letters from a Stoic

28 June 2021

Happy Birthday, Rubens

Rubens, Helena Fourment in a Fur Robe, 1638

Peter Paul Rubens was born on this day in 1577.

Waldemar Januszczak's Rubens: An Extra Large Tale ...

03 May 2020

Joy.

Rubens, Venus, Cupid, Bacchus and Ceres, 1613

Prepare yourselves

for the roaring voice of the God of Joy!

Euripides

28 June 2016

Happy birthday, Rubens.

Rubens, Portrait of a Bearded Man, 1612

Peter Paul Rubens was born on this day in 1577.

A painting, if the light is just so, can turn into a luminescent inferno which may reveal for just a moment the soul of the artist.

Peter Paul Rubens

Gallery of the Masters: Peter Paul Rubens

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL