RUBENS, Peter Paul
(b. 1577, Siegen, d. 1640, Antwerpen)

The Triumphal Entry of Henry IV into Paris

1627-30
Oil on canvas, 380 x 692 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

This painting was intended for the end wall of the east gallery of the Palais du Luxembourg, Paris, as the climactic scene in a cycle of twenty-four canvases depicting the Life of Henry IV. The pendant Life of Marie de' Medici, also consisting of twenty-four canvases (Musée du Louvre, Paris), was completed and installed in the west gallery of the palace by February 1625. Rubens had signed the contract for all forty-eight canvases on February 24, 1622. However, work on the Henry cycle was not begun before late 1627, and was then interrupted by the seven months Rubens spent in Madrid (1628-29) and nine months in London (1629-30). In the end, the decoration of the second gallery in the Queen Mother's residence was never completed, due to political opposition and Marie's exile to Brussels in 1631. In Rubens's estate inventory, six large, unfinished paintings depicting triumphs or battles of Henry IV are recorded, of which five are known today (two are in the Uffizi; the others are in the museums of Göteborg and Munich, and in the Rubenshuis, Antwerp). Also known are four oil sketches for the Henry cycle that do not correspond to surviving canvases.

Rubens's work on this composition illustrates his extraordinary ability to synthesize visual and symbolic ideas. The final composition is at once a representation of the king's actual victories in the 1590s and a grand classical metaphor which sums up in a single glance the scenes that the viewer would then have seen sequentially in the long gallery devoted to the Life of Henry IV. The failure of the project, through no fault of his own, was probably Rubens's greatest disappointment in a career distinguished by several successes on a similarly ambitious scale.




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