Royal Academy exhibits Rubens

In London, the Royal Academy of Arts has opened the first major exhibition providing an overview of the life and works of Peter Paul Rubens.

Although Rubens is most well-known for his paintings of curvy women, he also tackled many other subjects and the exhibition, Rubens and His Legacy, highlights this and includes major works by other artists who have been influenced by him, including Landseer and Klimt.

Nico Van Hout, the exhibition’s curator, explained that Rubens had always placed movement, colour, and sensuality at the heart of his work: “His vitality is in fact the result from blurred contours. Contours that are not very sharply drawn mainly in his later work and that was also inspiring for many artists, so how to depict movement of a flat image and not cinema yes, it’s a difficult thing, so you can do that through this trick of painting blurred contours.”

As part of this exhibition, artist Jenny Saville, who is celebrated for her large-scale oil paintings of female nudes