1577–1640

Painter
Diplomat
Draftsman

Cultivated Upbringing.

Peter Paul Rubens, the greatest seventeenth-century Flemish artist, came from an important family in the port city of Antwerp. His father, however, was a Protestant and at the time of Peter Paul's birth, the family was living in exile in Germany. Rubens spent the first nine years of his life in Cologne and the small town of Siegen, before his father died and his mother returned with the family to Antwerp. At the time of the family's arrival there, war between the Netherlands' provinces and Spain was underway, and the family soon converted to Catholicism, since Antwerp was quickly becoming a bastion of Spanish power in the region. Antwerp, which had for much of the sixteenth century been one of Northern Europe's most important centers of trade, was just beginning to enter into a period of decline. Eventually, the...