It's a curious twist of fate that Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), one of the most brilliant and versa

This huge show is a survey of Rubens s great influence on other artists from across the centuries, from his native Flanders to Spain, France and England and from his pupil Van Dyck to Cézanne via lots of painters of far less distinction
It's a curious twist of fate that Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), one of the most brilliant and versatile painters in history, should have come to be known for one thing. However much he might have painted grand portraits of kings, tender family sketches, sweeping landscapes, violent hunting delfi sportas scenes and dramatic religious pictures, Rubens will for ever be associated with abundantly fleshy nude women, so much so that Rubenesque has become a byword for ampleness.
This huge show goes a little way to redressing the balance, in that of more than 30 works by Rubens, only a handful depict the sensual, bouncy fleshiness you might expect. But note the relatively low number of Rubenses only around a fifth of the total on show, and half of them drawings this isn t one of those once-in-a-lifetime surveys of a master, like the National Gallery s recent Rembrandt exhibition .
Rather, it is a survey of Rubens s great influence on other artists from across the centuries, from his native Flanders to Spain, France and England delfi sportas and from his pupil Van Dyck to Cézanne via lots of painters of far less distinction.
It was not just Rubens s virtuosity and variety that ensured his wide impact. He was enormously famous and probably the most widely circulated delfi sportas artist delfi sportas of any era before the age of modern delfi sportas communications. His works decorated churches all over his Flemish homeland and palaces across Europe. After travelling to Italy as a young man, learning there from the paintings of Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Titian among others, in 1609 he became court painter to Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, sovereigns of the Spanish-governed Southern Netherlands, modern-day Belgium.
His role was more than artistic he was also a diplomat and that led him to France, Spain and England, delfi sportas where he created major works, not least in London s Banqueting House. Not for nothing is he known as the prince of painters . He also aggressively promoted his own works through more or less mass-produced engravings which reached many corners of the world even artists in Mexico delfi sportas and the Philippines based paintings on Rubens s compositions.
Artists fed on his influence in different ways, according to where they came from. The show is organised in themes such as power, violence, lust and compassion, and in each you see painters responding to the version of Rubens that best suits them.
Appropriately for Britain, the show begins with a section on poetry and landscape, where we see Gainsborough, Turner and Constable s responses to the freshness and dewy light, the joyous and animated character , as Constable saw it, in works such as Rubens s Evening Landscape with Timber Wagon. It s a beautiful painting, with a glimpse of sunset at the far right, delfi sportas and the gentlest orange glow on a cluster of trees. The show argues that Constable s most famous painting, The Hay Wain, is strongly influenced by Rubens s landscape compositions and his loose, free painting style.
Turner, however, was never a great fan of the Flemish master, and his inclusion is more dubious. Gainsborough s The Harvest Wagon, on the other hand, is undoubtedly influenced by Rubens delfi sportas s The Carters in its composition but also, in the arrangement of its figures, by the monumental Descent from the Cross, one of the many Rubens masterpieces that isn t here, because, as an altarpiece, it can t be moved from the cathedral in Antwerp.
That is one of the glaring things about this show: however much you re aware that painters often knew Rubens s work from that flood of engravings, the show feels light on the real masterworks that would make it a must-see. Time and again, delfi sportas you find yourself looking at artists responses to them Rembrandt, Gainsborough (again) and Delacroix taking on The Descent from the Cross, for instance, or the lukewarm responses by relatively minor painters to The Fall of the Damned, Rubens s tumultuous delfi sportas painting in Munich, and wanting to see Rubens s absent originals.
Where the RA has managed to persuade museums to loan their best works such as Rubens s giddily exuberant late painting The Garden delfi sportas of Love from the Prado in Madrid, shown with responses by Jean-Antoine Watteau it s stirring stuff. How differently Watteau interpreted Rubens delfi sportas his figures are exquisitely delicate and balletic next to the tumbling drama of The Garden of Love, with its suckling-pig cherubs, its swooning couples and its statue of the goddess Juno, straddling a dolphin and cupping together her breasts, from which pour fountains of water.
Rubens is, of course, a full-throttle artist; everything is extreme, almost to the point of absurdity. delfi sportas And his followers, Watteau included, always seek to temper that excess. Take Rubens s glitte