Rubens and His Legacy: crass analogies, bad ideas – and barely any Rubens

Rubens was so great he managed to invent nudes, portraits, rainbows and even Jesus Christ – or so the Royal Academy would have us believe in its sloppy and simplistic new exhibition, Rubens and His Legacy

The irritation started when I entered the first room of the Royal Academy’s much-touted epic exhibition Rubens and His Legacy and my eyes fell on a painting by John Constable. It is hard to think of a painter who has less in common with Rubens. But the curators have spotted one connection I never guessed: they both painted rainbows. Perhaps this room should also include paintings with rainbows in them by Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay and the Chapman brothers. Why not? That is the RA’s less than precise approach to art history.

So Rubens invented the rainbow, apparently. He also invented the grand portrait, the nude and Jesus Christ – or so you might believe if you took Rubens and His Legacy seriously. To be fair, Constable’s intensely churned landscape painting Cottage at East Bergholt (c 1833) does indeed emulate the composition of Rubens’ Landscape with Rainbow (mid-1630s) hanging nearby. The trouble is, such isolated facts are given hugely exaggerated significance in this sloppy exhibition. Rubens and His Legacy tries to distort the rich and complex story of art to fit a simplistic big idea. Constable, Turner and Gainsborough – all of whose landscapes are juxtaposed with those of Rubens here – were fascinated by the great European masters: their biggest “influence” was the 17th-century French landscape artist Claude. So why try to claim that Rubens was somehow their one true source?

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