Gardens intertwine with art like honeysuckles round a bush of lilac. Gardeners often have an artistic vision when they plan and plant. Artists are also famous for gardens they devise. Sometimes they paint them, Monet and his garden at Giverny being the most famous pair. Sometimes they paint in them, like Delacroix in the little garden outside his Paris studio.
In the 1620s and 30s a garden was integral to the large town house of the master artist Peter Paul Rubens in the centre of thriving Antwerp. It has just been replanted after meticulous historical study. So I have checked it out at a prime time for tulips.
Rubens’ house and garden broaden our understanding of him. He is far more of an artist than superficial gallery-goers think, equating him with those sweeps of bare flesh on curvy women in some of his biggest paintings. In 1608, he returned, newly married, from eight crucial years in Italy and, in 1610, bought a big property in central Antwerp. He enlarged and redesigned the house, only moving there in 1615. The garden inside its high walls was the last item to be laid out.
On site I began to understand its detail, first in the courtyard below his special studio, then in buildings in the garden beyond, and finally in the garden itself. The expert director of the Rubenshuis, Bert Watteeuw, helped me to imagine I was entering Rubens’ property after the smell and disorder of the street outside. I would realise Rubens was a man of taste. A tall portico, like a triumphal arch, frames the entrance into his garden and projects moral messages in sculptures and Latin inscriptions. The texts are quotations from the satirical poet Juvenal, active in Rome in the early second century AD. One urges us to leave the divine powers to bring about what is apt for us. The other expresses the famous ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body and a mind without fear of death, neither knowing how to be angry nor desiring anything. As a classicist, I felt an instant bond with Rubens and his principles.
Wittily, these solemn texts are held up by wilder figures, female and male satyrs, linked to Bacchic orgies and lust. They signify that pleasure is also appropriate in the garden beyond. On the portico, a head of Medusa looks out at visitors. In myth it turned spectators to stone, but here it is made of stone itself.
As Rubens painted profusely, he built a sort of factory-studio on to his house for himself and his assistants. On its outer walls, panels of carved stone also project classical imagery, some of which is based on descriptions of lost works by ancient master artists. Some of them are Bacchic, but one of them depicts my hero Alexander the Great, naked and being crowned by a winged victory. I suggest that Rubens based this unusual scene on imagery known from an ancient gem, one seen in Italy, perhaps in Mantua, where he worked. Like other panels, it shows a lost work by the great Apelles, Alexander’s personal painter. Rubens was called the “Belgian Apelles” by contemporaries both before and during the years when he was rebuilding his Antwerp house.
Below the panels, a bust of the philosopher Seneca projects Rubens’ admiration for this Stoic thinker, one whose maxims have been neatly described as the Romans’ equivalent of “thought for the day”. He also presented Hercules, another of his role models. A statue of him stands in the elegant loggia which terminates the view through the garden. Aptly, its Hercules holds the golden apples he had laboured to recover from the faraway Hesperides: in the garden Rubens grew many yellow-fruited citrus trees in pots. In niches, a statue of Dionysus-Bacchus and another of naked Aphrodite again remind viewers that gardens are places of partying and desire.
This prolific imagery presents Rubens as a person of learning, ethics and classical values: how did he pay for it? Watteeuw explained that he was domiciled in Antwerp but, as the court painter, enjoyed tax-free status for life. He only paid tax if an item was already subject to it. He refused to buy barrels of beer because they came with a sales tax, but his servants went on strike, demanding it nonetheless. Rubens had to give in.
Seneca and Stoic philosophy, maxims from Juvenal, panels presenting art described, but not preserved, from antiquity: Rubens remained devoted to Italy, but these humanist tastes were shared with other cultural leaders in Antwerp. He was intimately linked with them, as his portraits for the Plantin family show, master printers of books in historic premises which can still be enjoyed with their garden court.
Among epimediums, white spring snowflakes and green-yellow euphorbias, I sat in the garden beside a flowering quince tree with Klara Alen, the scholar who worked on its historical replanning. Rubens’ heyday coincided with the craze for tulip bulbs, the famous tulipomania whose bubble burst in 1637. In archives, Alen has found the first proof that Antwerp had tulip clubs too and that Rubens had links with dealers and growers who propelled the market. The thousand tulips now in the garden range from narrow-petalled acuminata, which is closest to the early Turkish varieties, to a modern one called Rubens. They will be replanted yearly, supplemented by peacock anemones and fritillaries, mostly ones that texts in Antwerp attest at the time.
Round the garden runs a tall hooped pergola, what French designers called a “berceau” or cradle. Alen explained that she had found the one letter by Rubens about his garden: he asks for figs and a variety of pear from his fruit gardener. Otherwise, she devised her plan from plants known textually in contemporary Antwerp gardens and from two important paintings. One, by Rubens and his studio, is of himself, his second wife and his son in a burgeoning garden in 1630-31 with a loggia matching his own. It shows peacocks and partridges, but it also gives an idea of plantings in Rubens’ own garden. It is now in Munich, where the Alte Pinakothek keeps it in storage: it should be lent at once for display at Rubens’ house.
The other painting is by David Teniers in 1651. It shows a pergola among features based on Rubens’ garden. Similar pergolas have been devised in the reimagined Rubens garden and planted with hops, ivies and clematis armandii. Before long they will be green tunnels. Meanwhile, the flowerbeds will be fertilised from another source, Great Dixter, the fine garden in Sussex. Yannick Boulet trained there with Fergus Garrett, Christopher Lloyd’s head gardener, and is directing the Rubens plantings. Rubens liked marigolds: I expect to see Dixter’s tall Cinnabar marigolds this summer.
Up to 400,000 annual visitors are predicted once the house has been fully upgraded in 2030. Meanwhile, I sat at Rubens’ very own garden table in light that emphasised more than 50 shades of green. Boulet and I discussed see-through succession planting while cocktails of gin, cognac and absinthe, mixed with rhubarb and honey, were served as Bacchanalian accompaniments. Rubens’ head gardener, Alen has discovered, was one of his highest-paid servants, so I toasted Rubens’ commitment to gardening. The curators replied by quoting a comment that they relish in their visitor book. “I came expecting to find fat ladies,” an American recently wrote, “but I was the only one.”
Robin Lane Fox’s travel was assisted by the City of Antwerp
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