Rubens, van Dyck and the Flemish School of Painting: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein

From the early sixteenth century onwards, a growing number of Flemish painters had made their way to Italy or other artistic centres in Europe in order to study and learn from the art being produced in these places, while also achieving great popularity there with their own painting. This contributed to the flourishing and spread of Flemish art. The young Peter Paul Rubens followed in this tradition, travelling to Italy. The art he encountered there had a major influence on his style and the works he painted in successive phases of his oeuvre.

Peter Paul Rubens and his pupil and successor Anthony van Dyck represent a landmark in Flemish painting. Hardly any other painter has had such an enduring influence on his own time as Rubens, and there is almost no area of Netherlandish painting that escaped his all-pervading influence. Rubens was both a universal artist and a cosmopolitan individual, preconditions for his subsequent glittering career. His large and flourishing studio, in which the young van Dyck worked, had a European reputation and earned him general admiration as an artist-entrepreneur, even during his own lifetime.

Rubens, van Dyck and Flemish painting in the Princely Collections

The Princely Collections have some of the most important holdings of Flemish painting in the world, not only in terms of quantity, but above all of quality, as attested by the fact that they hold one of the largest bodies of works by Rubens, including 30 paintings and oil sketches by his own hand. The collections also hold more than 20 paintings by van Dyck, together with numerous major works by other Flemish masters.

Since the first half of the seventeenth century, various members of the Princely House of Liechtenstein have had a special predilection for Flemish painting and, in particular, for the work of Rubens and van Dyck. It was Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein who purchased the first Rubens painting for the princely gallery. This was the Assumption, acquired in 1637, only a few years after it was painted. Following Rubens’s death in 1640, a large number of his works came onto the market, making them easier to acquire than in the previous generation. However, while the times were favourable for acquiring Flemish masterpieces, their attribution was a more problematic matter. Thus, in 1692, during the regency of Karl Eusebius’s successor, Prince Johann Adam Andreas I von Liechtenstein, a group of paintings depicting the life and death of the Roman general Decius Mus was acquired as a cycle by van Dyck. Comprising a total of eight monumental paintings, this series today forms the centrepiece of the Princely Collections and has been identified as the earliest of four pictorial cycles of its kind in Rubens’s oeuvre.

It is thought that during the regency of Prince Johann Adam Andreas I thirteen other paintings by Rubens joined those already in the collections. However, the contribution made by succeeding generations was far smaller, and at the end of the nineteenth century and after the Second World War a number of paintings by Rubens were sold off from the Princely Collections.

The present ruler, Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein, has happily been in a position over the past few years to continue the family tradition of collecting and substantially increase the holdings of works by Rubens. Today it may justifiably be claimed that hardly any other collection in the world would be able to mount an exhibition of Flemish painting in comparable numbers and quality exclusively with works from its own holdings, without recourse to loans from other institutions.