![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Coco Chanel famously collected Coromandel folding screens. In the 17th century, screens began to be imported to Europe where their popularity grew. Along with screens for tea ceremonies and dance backgrounds, there were screens for use in Shinto and Buddhist temples. These paintings frequently feature subjects such as landscapes, animals, flowers and Buddhist religious themes. The practice was introduced to Japan, where paintings for screens were made on paper and silk, in the 8th century. Chinese painting utilizes many of the same tools as calligraphy - these screens were crafted from wood with painted panels featuring striking art or calligraphy that told cultural stories or represented nature and life in the area. The earliest record of screens comes from the 2nd century B.C., and surviving examples date back to the Ming dynasty. The original folding screens were created by Chinese artists. Today, antique Asian folding screens and paintings are sophisticated decorative accents that can serve as makeshift partitions to ensure privacy. Artisans made screens that could be folded up or spread out by connecting several panels using hinges. The unusual thing about Rubens was that his sketches were generally executed in oil paint on panel (as opposed to chalk on paper) and that he preserved the fresh ‘evolving’ character of a sketch in his finished paintings.Traditional Asian paintings were often created on scrolls and folding screens. However the whole process is typical of Rubens’s ‘expanding’ landscapes (of which there are many examples) and corresponds to the way in which he (and indeed any artist) works on a sketch: beginning carefully in the centre and becoming more summary towards the margins. If the middle section was painted as Rubens left London the outsides could have been added in Flanders when Porter acquired the work for Charles I (perhaps to make it grander and more royal). These additions are almost certainly by Rubens but executed more rapidly than the centre and with a thinner application of paint. This in turn required strips to be added to the left and top to prevent the whole from becoming lop-sided and further mini-episodes to be created to fill corners. Rubens stitched a further eight rectangles of canvas to this basic ‘core’, the purpose of which seems to have been to add two new episodes: the mounted standard bearer to the right and the ‘Birth-Death’ contrast across the bottom. This is clearly a satisfactory composition in its own right and is very beautifully and delicately painted. The original composition sits in the left middle of the final one, its left edge just including the tower, its right edge just two complete tree-climbers, its top edge just two angels and its bottom edge just the base of the trunk of the left-hand tree. The Princess does not look anything like his Queen Henrietta Maria as has also been suggested.Īs with almost all Rubens’s landscapes this one grew in the making the many joins in the canvas are visible to the naked eye. Roger de Piles was the first to suggest (in 1677) that the setting and characters here are specifically English since then it has been generally agreed that the river is roughly-speaking the Thames (perhaps showing the view from York House where Rubens lodged in London) and that St George is a portrait of (or at an allusion to) Charles I. The painting was later ‘bought back’ for Charles I by his ambassador to the Spanish Netherlands, Endymion Porter, probably in 1634-5. This work was described in 1630 as one executed by Rubens ‘in honour of England’, which he sent home to Flanders as a ‘monument to his abode & employment here’ (Rubens stayed in England as a diplomat from 1629-1630). ![]()
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