ugh Rubens was born out of Antwerp, he
was a citizen of Antwerp by descent as well as by so many later
associations. His father, John Rubens, a lawyer, an imprudent,
thriftless man in character and habits, had been compelled to leave
Antwerp in consequence of religious disturbances which broke out there
about the time that the northern provinces, more at one and more decided
in their union than the southern provinces, established their
independence. Rubens spent his early boyhood at Cologne, but on the
death of his father when he was ten years of age, his mother, a good and
'discreet' woman, to whom the painter owed much, and confessed his debt,
returned with her family to Antwerp. His mother had destined him for his
father's profession, but did not oppose her son's preference for art.

After studying under two different artists, and becoming a master in the
guild of St Luke, Rubens went to Italy in 1600, when he was a young man
of three-and-twenty years of age. He was eight years absent, entering
the service of the ducal sovereign of Mantua, being sent by him on a
diplomatic mission to Madrid to Philip III, of Spain, visiting on his
own account Rome, where he found the Carracci and Guido[22] at the
height of their fame, Venice and Genoa, 'leaving portraits where he
went.'

With Genoa, its architecture, and its situation, Rubens was specially
charmed, but he quitted it in haste, being summoned home to attend the
death-bed of his mother, from whom he had parted eight years before; and
arriving too late to see her in life. A man of strong feelings in sorrow
as in joy, he withdrew into retirement, and resided for his season of
mourning in a religious house.

Loving Italy with a painter's enthusiasm, so that to the latest day of
his life he generally wrote in Italian, and loved to sign his name
'Pietro Paolo Rubens,' he had intended to return and settle in Mantua,
but having been named court painter to the Governess of the Netherlands,
Clara Eugenia, and her husband Albert, Rubens had sufficient patriotism
and sufficient worldly foresight to induce him to relinquish his idea,
and establish himself in his native Antwerp. He was already a man of
eminence in his profession, and a man of mark out of it. Go where he
would he made friends, and he so recommended himself to his royal
patrons by his natural suavity, tact, and sagacity, that he was not only
in the utmost favour with them as a right courtly painter, but was
employe