Rubens and His Legacy at the Royal Academy reviewed: his imitators fall short of their master miserably

The main spring offering at the Royal Academy, Rubens and His Legacy: Van Dyck to Cézanne, teaches two useful lessons. One — not much of a surprise — is that Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was a protean giant of a painter, expending sufficient artistic invention and energy to power other artists for centuries to come. The other conclusion is how hard compare-and-contrast exhibitions of this kind are to pull off.

The basic idea — that Rubens was a towering figure in European culture — is plainly valid (the best riposte to the tired observation that there are so few famous Belgians is that there are plenty of celebrated Flemings, among whom Rubens is pre-eminent). Demonstrating this in visual terms, however, involves piling up umpteen examples of later artists influenced by the great man. Most of these fail to come up to the grand original, some miserably.

Furthermore, the displays are arranged thematically, under such headings as ‘Lust’ — or nudes and mythological subjects — and ‘Compassion’, meaning Rubens’s religious works.