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| | The collection of Flemish painting in the New Hermitage is one of the finest in Europe. The display in this room allows us to sense the very spirit of this art - life-affirming, vivid, passionate as embodied in the brilliant work of Rubens. In his paintings an immense world with a staggering wealth of forms appears before us in constant motion, scintillating with a rainbow of bright colours. The artist extols the joys of daily life and the grandeur of heroic events. His canvases are filled with profound and powerful feelings. Rubens covered all genres of painting. Other artists by contrast specialized in one particular field. Van Dyke, for example, concentrated on portraiture, while Jordaens worked on genre pictures. Still the life-affirming, unsophisticated light-hearted scenes of the latter and the likenesses of the former with their precise characterization both contain what is the foundation of the Flemish tradition - realism. |
