The name of the great seventeenth-century Flemish painter，Peter Paul Rubens，is known throughout the world.The importance of his contribution to the development of European culture is generally recognized.The perception of life that he revealed in his pictures is so vivid，and fundamental human values are affirmed in them with such force，that we look upon Ruben’s painting as a living aesthetic reality of our own time as well.

Rubens’ work radiates energy， expressing a heady sense of life’s pleasures. His brilliant colours and inexhaustible imagination glorify the world in all its splendour.

Rubens exercised a powerful influence on later painters:his heroic idylls are echoed in the scenes galantes of Antoine Watteau and his hunting scenes in the work of Eugene Delacroix， while his paintings hymning the opu-lent beauty of the female figure lead in direct line to the nudes of Auguste Renoir.

The Life and Work of Peter Paul Rubens

The Collections of the Russian Museums

1 The Adoration of the Shepherds

2 Head of an Old Man

3 The Coronation of the Virgin

4 Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero)

5 The Crown of Thorns (“Ecce Homo”)

6 The Descent from the Cross

7 Venus and Adonis

8 Statue of Ceres

9 Bacchanalia

10 Hagar Leaves the House of Abraham

11  Portrait of a Franciscan Friar

12 Portrait of a Young Man

13 The Descent from the Cross

14 The Union of Earth and Water

15 Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee

16 The Carters

17 The Lion Hunt

18 Portrait of Charles de Longueval

19 Perseus and Andromeda

20 Maria de’ Medici in the Guise of Pallas

21 The Meeting at Lyons

22 The Birth of Louis XIII

23 The Coronation of Maria de Medici

24 The Apotheosis of Henri IV

25 Portrait of a Maid of Honor of the lnfanta Isabella

26 The Vision of St Ildefonso

27 The Last Supper

28 The Union of the the Two Crowns

29 The Apotheosis of James I

30 Landscape with a Rainbow

31  Felicitations on the Arrival of the Infante Ferdinand in Antwerp

32 Statues of the Emperors of the Hapsburg House

33 The Apotheosis of the Infanta Isabella

34 The Arch of Ferdinand

35 The Temple of Janus

36 Mercury Leaving Antwerp

37 The Arch of Hercules

38 Bacchus

39 Pastoral Scene

40 Landscape with Cimon and Iphigenia

Biography

Bibliography