The Queen’s Gallery in central London turns for the first time to the Flemish masters of the 16th and 17th centuries, from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Peter Paul Rubens, reaching back into the late 15th century with Massys and Memling, and, with the younger David Teniers, into the 1640s and 1650s.
And if Rubens is the undoubted star, his young pupil, Van Dyck, and Teniers too shine all the more brightly for his company.
The religious and diplomatic conflicts within the Holy Roman Empire and the low countries throughout this period are inseparable from the art.
Thus the great Bruegel tableau of The Massacre of the Innocents (c 1567), painted in the brief interval of negotiation before Protestant Flanders broke out in open revolt against Catholic Spain in 1568, can be construed as an open satire or as prescient of horrors to come.
Dirty work
It soon came into the collection of the emperor Rudolph II, who ordered changes to be made by another hand, objecting perhaps to the Hapsburg crest on the herald’s tabard, the jutting beard on the general’s chin and the gaudy German mercenaries gleefully setting about King Herod’s dirty work.
By 1604 the painting was in the inventory as A Village Plundering, with the slaughtered children painted over with geese and assorted livestock, and the village women weeping in the snow over nothing more than their lost goods.
But paint thins with age, and after a recent cleaning the ghostly presence of the victims is now clearly visible — a boot here, an arm there, a little head, a groping hand. It is an astonishing and wonderful thing.
It might seem the odd one out in the first room, where it has only rather quiet portraits for company — Erasmus by Massys (1517); a head of a young man by Memling (c 1480); and an anonymous near-caricature of Emperor Charles V, flaunting the famous chin (c 1517).
Yet the genre aspect of The Massacre of The Innocents, with its essential narrative set in everyday life, was already well established in the Flemish and Burgundian art of the 15th century, and, for all the obvious differences of emphasis and manner, it was a tradition that would continue long afterwards in the work of the elder Jan Bruegel (Pieter’s son), Teniers, and indeed Rubens in certain moods.
Rubens’ is indeed the commanding presence, with three great portraits — a delicate and clearly respectful head of the young Van Dyck (1628), a luscious, full-bosomed half-length of, perhaps, his future sister-in-law, Susanna Lunden (c 1629) and the magnificent self-portrait of 1623, sent to the future Charles I in an act of enlightened self-interest.
Even so, it is Rubens in his genre aspect, with the two huge landscapes commonly called Summer and Winter and a smaller bucolic idyll of a milkmaid and cattle on a scrubby hillside, that is more intriguing here — personal works, painted at more or less the same time around 1617.
The Summer landscape is in fact more like spring in spirit, and its pairing with Winter, a wonderfully vast image of the interior of a barn on a bitter morning, with cows in their stalls and herdsmen and women around a fire, is entirely circumstantial.
An unspoken “Nativity” perhaps, or “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”, it also leads directly to that other significant aspect of the Flemish and Dutch genre tradition — the low-life tavern, military or domestic scene, the peasant fair or festival.
This tradition is notably continued here in a remarkable group of paintings by Teniers, an artist long overdue for reappraisal.
His St George’s Day (1647) is a celebration at a village inn, full of lively, delightful and sometimes insalubrious incident.
But his masterpiece is an earlier work, showing a group of fishermen sorting their catch on a bleak shore, with the grey sea beyond and the grey sky above (c 1638), a sombre, understated allegory of the human lot.
It is thought to have influenced Turner, who saw it around the time it was acquired by the Prince Regent in 1812.
This is a small exhibition, with 51 works in all, but undaunting and full of delights.
Van Dyck is strongly represented by a large canvas of Christ and the Paralytic (1619), painted when he was barely 20, along with a couple of other devotional pieces.
But the choicer treat is a half-length portrait of his mistress, Margaret Lemon (c 1638), wearing nothing but a crimson silk wrap and a quizzical smile.
Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting runs until April 26, 2009, at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.
